


The Sea Captain’s Daughter

by foux_dogue



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Language, F/M, Lore and Worldbuilding, Nabateans - Freeform, Or: what to do when you catch yourself a rogue Nabatean saint, Origin Story, Pirates, Post fall of Zanado, Rise of Seiros and the Saints, Sexual Content, Some dark themes, Tragic Romance, Very much pre-game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:40:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23690218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foux_dogue/pseuds/foux_dogue
Summary: When she’d been a little girl, Caterina’s father had told her stories about how her mother lived in a palace under the sea. He’d spun the tale of her shimmering scales so well that his daughter had nearly forgotten that her mother had just been an unlucky girl from Sreng who’d laid with men for coin. All the same, Caterina still claimed the sea as her birthright. Salt was in her blood, and she was more than willing to spill it to take what she wanted.But when she catches a wounded sea serpent in her nets — one who becomes a man with sea-grass hair and a proud glare that has nothing to do with the way he’s making a bloody mess of her deck — she has no choice but to reconsider the truth hidden in old fairytales.
Relationships: Seteth/Flayn’s Mother
Comments: 46
Kudos: 98





	1. Flotsam and Jetsam

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Brief mention of rape

Lots of people said that they loved the sea. They loved the smell, they’d say, or the rush of the waves; the glitter of the sun against the turquoise of the water, or perhaps the strange creatures that could be plucked from the great beneath. It was all bullshit, as far as Caterina was concerned. No one _loved_ the sea — not when it was churning and spitting in your face, not when it was in your mouth and filling up your lungs. They were simply tempted by it. That was the reason for all of those old stories about mermaids and sirens: people stupid enough to wander into riptides, and the ones they left behind to explain just why they’d done it.

She was the exception. Sure, there was something prideful in the admission, but that didn’t make it any less true. When her crew cowered in the belly of her ship during a storm she’d be the one climbing into the rigging, after all. But then again, maybe it wasn’t really _love_ for her, either. Most likely it was closer to that ugly hunger common to old drunk bastards when they found themselves squared against a pretty girl. Conquest. Yes. That’s what it was — and lucky for Caterina, the sea was just big enough to be worth conquering.

“Captain!”

“Morning, Captain!”

“Have a bit of fish, would you, Captain?”

The last greeting won her over. She turned from her morning review of the _Sea Snake_ to lean against one of the frigate’s fat masts in order to eye the finger-shaped fish offered in her direction. She picked the most meager from the bunch and popped it into her mouth, crunching through bones and salt-flake as she winked a thank-you to the man at her side.

“Good winds today,” the man offered. She nodded. That sort of thing tempts a woman to look at the heavens when she hears it, and so she did. The sky was so blue it made her squint. Even with her lashes laced together she could still see the fat-bottomed clouds racing above their heads.

“Good winds,” she agreed. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand and then pulled a skin of thin-as-piss ale from her hip to wash the salt from her mouth. The man took it from her when she then brandished it in his direction, downing a swig himself and no doubt dreaming, like she had, about how lovely it would be to drink fresh water again.

“We’ll be in Brigid in a fortnight at this pace,” Caterina continued. He nodded

“A fortnight or four of them,” he answered with a goodnatured shrug. It was code, just like most things said on a ship like that; _we’re with you_ is it what it meant. Her crew was eating well and sleeping when it wanted — had enough of that miserable ale to keep from being parched, and more than enough of the harder stuff to make a good night for themselves. They had gold in their pockets burning to be spent, and nearly all of them still had the limbs with which they’d first boarded the _Snake_ back in Morfis. _We aren’t whispering about taking off your head_ is what that meant, too; which was, quite honestly, good news for all of them.

“What will you do when we get there, Captain?” he asked her. She gave him a shrug of her own.

“What anyone does in Brigid: make some pretty friends, take in the sun...get out of it for awhile. This was your first contract, eh?”

The man’s lips quirked into the shape of something akin to bashfulness, which she found endearing, if also completely ridiculous. He nodded.

“You did well,” she told him, clapping his arm as she did. “Think about a second, would you? I can always use men like you.”

“Yes, Captain,” he quickly answered. He then caught himself. “For the proper price, of course.” She laughed.

“Of course. That’s the business. I’m a good sailor but a bad teller, you know. I’ll always pay well. So then.” She wiped the last oily remnants of her breakfast against the front of her jerkin. “Keep yourself dry.”

He nodded his head at her farewell. His eagerness at her proposal was hardly a surprise. There was a hierarchy in their world, after all, and she’d clawed her way to the top. And sure, there were still a few bloody handholds left between her and the very summit, but she was young. There’d be plenty of time for her to finish proving herself. In the meantime she had one of the biggest ships south of Almyra, and certainly the fastest. Even better was her reputation, which was shaped in just the way that a captain of her caliber wanted when they were sailing the sorts of waters she always sought out.

The air began to warm as the sun snuck further upwards from the surf. The _Snake_ ’s sails billowed open with its breath. Caterina leaned into the frigate’s heel, dancing with a nimble step around her men and the neat coils of the ropes they tugged into place with hard-calluses hands. She never grew tired of it — cutting through the roll of the waves and listening to the bawdy songs her crew sang as they sailed. It was easy to lose herself in her work at the helm. There’d always been something nice about easy things.

“Flotsam at the aft! Starboard!”

Just that _easy_ always seemed to be a fleeting thing.

“Alright. Prepare to tack,” she ordered Piero, her towering first mate. He nodded and snatched up a handle to slot into a nearby set of winches tied to the closest sail. She watched the scurry of her men doing the same across the deck. At the bow a skinny, sunburned boy shouted something to a woman with the same silver hair that Piero wore. The boy’s message passed upwards between bowed heads until she could hear it shouted herself.

“False alarm. Some sort of kill. A whale, most like. We’ll cut through it.”

Caterina nodded. The _Snake_ was nimble, but it was easier to hold their course than to zig-zag against the wind. She gripped the wheel again and eased back into a loose stance. It was broken only moments later by another cry.

“Monster!’

This time she didn’t wait for her crew to carry the message across the deck. _Monster_. It wasn’t unheard of, although it was rare for them to wander so far out to the sea. Usually it was buzzards, although she didn’t doubt that some of the damned four-legged things could swim with enough gumption. She hated monsters. They made a real mess if you didn’t deal with them properly, and never had much to offer for the trouble. Even the meat tasted sour, although perhaps anything would be a delicacy now that they’d become so accustomed to hard tack and brined sardines.

“Just when you were getting a little fat,” she teased Piero, who gave her an unimpressed look of his own. It was, of course, a ridiculous contention: the man was made of steel and nothing else. She doubted he’d had a soft part to him even when he’d been in his swaddling clothes. He’d already found his axe, the massive blade now swung over his shoulder, and so in any case she was still right — that they’d been so terribly lazy, lately, and were now perhaps a bit eager for some exercise.

Caterina skipped down the steps from the platform of the helm onto the deck proper. The chaos of the excited crew parted at her approach, watching the twitch of her empty fingers as she dashed towards the starboard rails.

“There! There!” a set of voices cried out, paired with fingers pointing downwards at the milky churn of the surf cast backwards by the frigate’s bulk. She first caught sight of grey skin turned quicksilver under the sunlight. _Monster_ , she scoffed; maybe they’d been at sea too long. They’d been right about the whale. Her eyes darted to the dark blood slicked across the rolling surf — they’d been right about the _kill_ , too. She sighed, dejected, and crossed her arms.

“All of that for—” she started. Her sardonic reprimand was swallowed up by a sudden harrowed cry. It was the sound of steel scraping against steel, but louder than any humble sword fight could have possibly hoped to manage. A cold sweat gathered on her nape. She realized a half second later that her fingers had already found the grips of her pistols without her mind suggesting that she perhaps take the opportunity to arm herself.

“Tack! Another pass! Now!” Caterina shouted. “Draw the nets! Ready them to drop!”

The _Snake_ was fast. They’d already left the creature in their wake, but that hardly meant that it wasn’t following them. And whatever it was, it wasn’t some mangy wolf suddenly struck by the desire for a morning swim. Her heart was already drumming in her ears. Not a monster, she was now certain, or at least not a monster like they’d meant. Not a whale, either, although that seemed a little closer to the truth. It was some child of the sea. She felt her lips pull into a wolffish grin. That meant it was hers for the taking.

“Any man who falls in swims home,” she shouted next — a bawdy version of her order for them to be careful. Her men hooted and grunted in response, yanking a heavy net from its suspension over the deck and finding the right spots to hold so that they could steal this new bounty of theirs without filling their chests with seawater. By then they’d already cut into their tack. The sails snapped and clanged as they were sucked empty, and cracked again as they were quickly filled with a new bellow when the frigate turned. The crew leaned into the new heel with a familiar ease that would have left the less seasoned man dizzy and retching.

“There! There,” Caterina gasped. Her pulse hammered at what she saw. A long body, serpentine and writhing; the flash of crooked fangs; a catfish’s wispy beard magnified a hundred times and whipped with a snap through the air.

“Monster!” a voice cried anew, and this time with a different confidence. “Sea monster!”

“Take it!” Caterina cried, leaping forward to take hold of the net herself as they swung it into the water. She watched as the webbed netting swelled open with the surf. The turquoise water had turned white with churn. Even at their height they were still sprayed with it — enough for the strays of her hair to wet and stick against her brow as they pulled tight against a sudden tension. Her breath began to spill from her lips in the form of thrilled laughter.

“Come on, you legless bastards,” she sang, leaning into a crouch to haul harder against the creature’s tussle. “Pull, for fuck’s sake — _pull_!”

The _Sea Snake_ ’s crew was many things. First and foremost, and to Caterina’s great pride, it was obedient. They stepped backwards across the deck with a synchronized step, groaning and grunting as they shifted the net upwards from the depth. They’d made three paces when the fourth suddenly sent them tumbling backwards. The deck crowded with curses and surprised cries, and Caterina’s the loudest among them when someone shouted _she’s broken free!_

Caterina pushed herself upwards from her knees to see their loss with her own eyes. It was plain enough already. The bedraggled net was sprawled limp across the deck where it had been taut only moments before. Her dreams of parading some massive skull through the streets of Brigid dissolved with every step, replaced with a sulky feeling that was as sore as the dull ache of her bruised elbows.

“Man overboard!”

This newest cry quickly burned away her self pity. It was replaced by a fiery possessiveness. She’d lied about the swimming, of course. There were some captains who were hardened to the idea of losing men, but she’d never counted herself among their number. She was already itching to strip off her leathers and jump into the sea to drag whomever had fallen back up onto the deck again herself — and it would hardly be the first time.

“In the nets! Pull him up!”

Apparently she’d keep her britches dry that day, however. She joined a throng of men at the railing to pull the tail end of the netting upwards. It had a heft to it — not like the weight of the beast they’d lost, but perhaps enough to be a man tossed overboard for the trouble. 

“Hell,” a voice cried out, “who’s that?”

“Shit,” another added as the net slumped onboard. A body tumbled in a tangle inside the diamond weave — pale limbs, long and bare and sculpted in the way that men’s bodies tended to carry their heft.

“Ha,” Piero said, suddenly made manifest at her side. “Nasty bitch coughed up its lunch.”

Caterina watched as a pair of women made quick work of cutting the net apart. A part of her soured at the sight. It would take hours to mend it again, and here they were making it worse. A far greater portion of herself focused on their new castaway’s seaweed-colored hair. It was long and tangled; and difficult, really, to discern from the mess of the net cradling his naked frame. He was pale in most of his other parts. She hadn’t seen skin like that for ages — not with the company she kept, and all of them, even the fairest haired, long turned sienna from the sun. There was a gash along his side. It was dripping with a sluggish pulse instead of the usual fervor that she’d come to expect with fresh-doled wounds. There was something off about the color, although it was hard to make much of it against the deck’s slick varnish. She thought once more of the dark sludge that had coated the waves at their first approach.

“Bring him to Naima,” she told Piero, her eyes still downcast.

“Unlucky bastard,” Piero answered as he turned to follow her orders. Caterina felt the pull of a grin again.

“Unlucky,” she agreed. It seemed to her to not be so mutual a term.

* * *

“Is he alive?” 

Naima didn’t immediately answer Caterina’s question. She very rarely made it that easy for her. As was her tendency, she instead took her time in smoothing the silk of her wrapped tunic first, her honey eyes both sweet and sultry as she toyed with her captain’s attention.

“Have you done this just to keep me entertained?” the Almyran purred. Caterina smirked, leaning into the square of the door. Even now her eyes struggled to adjust to the dim dark of the room — Naima’s domain, rather, filled with perfumes and incense despite how long they’d been at sea. It was all theatrics, of course. It gave the crew comfort to mistaken the woman for some sort of alchemical priestess instead of what she really was: a runaway with three quarters of a physician’s study under her belt and a knack for mixing the sort of tinctures that would heal you, but would do an even better job of luring you into a dizzy-eyed stupor.

“You know I do most everything for you,” Caterina drawled in reply. Naima laughed, feigning coquette behind the slender curve of her palm.

“I _have_ been so _terribly_ lonely,” the woman agreed. “You’ve been a careful sailor lately. I suppose that’s all good and well, but it leaves me with little more than my own thoughts to keep me company.”

“And your company, then,” Caterina insisted, nodding at the man sprawled sleeping in the sway of a nearby hammock.

“What company he is,” Naima cooed. “Tell me, did you really fish him up?”

“Like a flounder.” Caterina pushed off from the door to slink deeper into the room. “The men say he was coughed up from the belly of a whale, but I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Saw what, exactly?”

“The sea,” Caterina answered cryptically. Naima rolled her eyes. She wasn’t unfamiliar with Caterina’s fanciful soliloquies about the ocean — particularly not with their habit of making drinking partners out of one another, and with how they pretended to be honest with each other when they sometimes tumbled limb-locked in Caterina’s bed.

“Well,” Naima answered, “come look at what _I’ve_ seen.”

Caterina obeyed. She stepped closer to the hammock to watch Naima comb back a strand of the man’s salt-streaked hair. Her breath whistled from her lips as she saw what the Almyran meant to show her.

“A Nabatean.”

“Or an elf,” Naima giggled. “Or whatever else you fancy.”

Caterina huffed a breath of laughter. Yes. An elf or a unicorn or something even more fantastical dredged up from her girlhood books. Nabateans certainly belonged among their number. They’d been dead and gone for long enough to earn the distinction.

“Maybe we’ve been at sea for too long,” she admitted.

“Most probably,” Naima laughed. “But it’s not yet noontime. I can smell that you’re sober, Captain, and alas, so am I. There’s more to it,” she then added, turning to snatch a rag from a crumpled pile at her feet. She handed it over to Caterina, who turned it between her hands. The muslin was stained a deep emerald green still tacky to her touch.

“This is his _blood_?”

She was answered by the man himself — and not in words but in the sudden sharp suck of air and the creak of the hammock as he shuddered awake. He braced his shoulders, groaning against the wound now neatly bound by Naima’s clever hands as his eyes darted between the women. They were wide and half-blind in the gloom.

“You — what,” he croaked. He made a move to lurch forward and gasped, flinching against an invisible hand as it pushed him downwards again. Caterina’s eyes flitted to a strand of innocuous-looking beads strung around his neck and quickly understood what had happened.

“Clever,” she told Naima. The woman’s tinted lips turned into a smile.

“I thought you would be interested in keeping him around for awhile.”

“Ever more in your debt, aren’t I, darling?”

Naima winked at Caterina’s contention.

“You,” the man insisted thinly, his voice nearly a whisper. “Who are you?”

Caterina stepped closer to make a proper introduction. At her distance she could make out the color of the man’s eyes — was unsurprised, moreover, to find them a sea glass green.

“Agarthan,” he snarled before she’d had the chance to offer him her name. She frowned, confused, until she traced his gaze to the dark grips of her pistols.

“Ah,” she tutted, pulling one from its holster and spinning it by the trigger guard around the knuckle of her pointer finger. “These? Yes. What a discerning eye. Do you like them? Pretty, aren’t they? Let me tell you, they didn’t come cheap. That as well,” she then added, nodding to the hexed charm at his throat. “Although it’s of a bit of a different vintage.”

His face crumpled into a bestial scowl. To be honest, it made her blood run a little cold. She laughed away the chill and took the time to slip her pistol back into its holster.

“Not a follower of Agartha, are you? Don’t let it bother you. I’m an equal opportunity buyer. Look here — Dagdan cotton,” she then added, thumbing the blanket tossed over his nakedness. “Albinean leather.” She brushed her palm over the front of her well-worn jerkin. Next she spread her fingers over her heartbeat. “Srengish flesh. Do you have a preference?”

“Let me free,” he answered. She understood that it was meant as a threat. His words were far less frightening than his glare.

“No,” she tutted, stepping back a pace to take a better look at him. He was strange, she decided: handsome in a way, but feral in many others. No matter what he was — and she was quite certain that she’d tease out the truth, if with some effort — it was clear that he was out of place there, and no different in that way than a fish gasping breathless out of water. “I don’t believe that’s how this will go.”

* * *

“Let me free,” he greeted her four mornings later. It was too early to wake, early riser that she was. She groaned into the dark and kicked leftwards from her hammock, grinning as she heard him bark in surprise when her heel cut into his side. No doubt it sent him swinging in his own low-slung bed. Served him right. She hadn’t been sleeping well — needed all of the hours that she could muster. It had never really been a problem before, but that had been when she’d had the comfort of sleeping with her crew. 

This was one of the many things that no doubt made her a bit of an unusual captain. Most figures in her position made a proper cabin in their ships, but hers had been transformed into a communal space for plan-making and general deviousness. She strung her hammock in with the rest of the women serving under her, finding solace in their snores as they all swung together against the bob of the _Snake_ ’s perpetual sail.

But then Naima had grown tired of her new patient — had, in fact, threatened to toss him overboard if Caterina didn’t take him from her, prone as he’d become to spilling the food she offered him and going on and on with his eternal diatribe of _let me free_ — and Caterina had been forced to reset the charm of his binding hex to her right wrist in place of the beams strung above the clinic’s tight quarters. Now he was her quite literal ball-and-chain, and that meant that he broke her steadfast rule about keeping men and women separate in the crew sleeping quarters (itself not a cure-all for misbehavior, but enough to keep it manageable when the brutes among them got too drunk and mistook their compatriots for victims of unwanted affection).

So she’d begrudgingly turned the aft cabin back into a cabin again, although it had taken the better part of an afternoon to shift around the table and to string up a set of hammocks with her castaway strung to her arm. It was lucky that she at least didn’t have to resort to a literal chain, but with the hex burning a ring into his skin whenever he wandered further than four paces from her, it wasn’t much better. In fact it called into question of just who between them had truly lost their liberty, although Caterina was just stubborn enough to not admit defeat too quickly.

But if he kept on waking her before the crack of dawn, gods help her, she might be forced to rethink her strategy.

“Tell me your name,” she countered, eyes still closed, her voice hoarse with sleep. They’d been having this conversation for over two days. _Let me free_ and _what’s your name_ ; it was exhausting. Piero looked ready to plug his ears with cotton from all of the repetition.

She heard the hammock next to her grunt with consternation. It made her grin sharpen into a crooked smirk. For a sea monster — although he was as unwilling to admit to _that_ as he was to offer her a proper introduction — he wasn’t so terribly ethereal. _Grumpy_ was a better word; _insufferable_ was even better. Even the greenest heads in her crew seemed to be more well-rounded in their social niceties, and they were the sort that cursed and spat when they were in the company of their sweet old grannies.

“What interest is it to you?”

Her eyes flashed open. He hadn’t offered her this response before. It very nearly seemed to qualify as a reply. She shifted in her hammock, turning to face him over the fabric’s curve.

“Do you know the name of my ship?”

She heard him snort some sort of unimpressed sound.

“The _Sea Snake_ ,” she continued, knowing well enough that he wouldn’t deign to actually participate in their conversation. “Of course I want to know your name. I want to know everything about you. As proud as I am of my old girl’s moniker, I’d never thought I’d fish a real one from the wild.”

“I am _not_ a snake,” he hissed, and admittedly using a voice that wasn’t much to his benefit. “And I have no intention of playing captive to some mad-woman.”

“Ah,” she replied sagely. “Lucky you that you haven’t. I saw you, you know. In the water.”

“The fact that I was cursed to be in your wake has nothing to do with the fact that I am, quite plainly, a man.”

This was certainly a record. She’d never heard him use so many words before. Naima’s poultices must have been working. Caterina’s smirk lingered, strong as ever on her lips.

“We’re six days from the Fangs at full-sail,” she countered. “How on earth does a _man_ find himself swimming out here all alone?”

“My ship,” he argued bitterly. “It took on water.”

“My condolences for your crew,” she drawled. He huffed again in his spot somewhere out there in the dark. “Is that how you found yourself stuck with a harpoon? Wrong place in the wrong time as you were _taking on water_?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he scoffed. “A _harpoon_?”

She slipped her arms over the edge of her hammock, crossing them to plant her chin against them and peering out at his shadowy shape.

“I’ve gone whale-hunting before. I know the look of it. It’s not a bite or a tear; it’s a puncture. So who hunted you?”

“My ship took on water,” he repeated bitterly. Caterina rolled her eyes.

“I don’t like liars, but that doesn’t mean I’m not used to them.”

She slipped finally from her hammock and stretched her arms tight above her head. Then she knelt to catch a nearby lamp wick alight with the flick of steel against flint. She could see the whites of his eyes watching her, no doubt counting the steps before that hexed strand pulled him from his perch. He looked like a devil in the dark; hair tangled and unwashed, because of course he hadn’t let Naima near him when she’d offered him some of that ubiquitous ale to at least pull the salt from it.

A _man_ , she scoffed, this time silent; _hardly_.

* * *

There was a knock at her door. She glanced up from her maps to watch as Piero swung it open. She didn’t often hide inside, but they’d recently found themselves in a doldrums. Of course, these things happened. The wind would rise again. They had plenty of supplies in the meantime. It meant a delay in their arrival in Brigid, but it also allowed her some time to plan out her next route. She took it as a blessing. She’d never been very good at sitting in one place, but if she sat at all at least she could use it to strategize how to start moving again. 

Her castaway had glowered for two hours after they’d broken their fast. Then he’d paced in a tight circle at the far corner. At noon she’d lost her patience for it and had ordered him to mend some of the crews’ shirts that had grown threadbare in their months sent sailing. He’d turned his nose at it at first, of course, but by hour seven she’d caught him glumly picking at a tear with the point of his needle. He seemed a rather serviceable seamstress, all things considered.

“Captain,” Piero greeted her. She nodded, her gaze drifting from his broad shoulders to a small woman cowered at his side. Caterina recognized her as one of the galley attendants. She had some ash from the stoves smudged on her chin, so that seemed as good a confirmation as anything.

“Miss Juliette here would like a word.”

“Would she?” Caterina cocked a brow. Piero wouldn’t bring her anything undeserving of her attention. She nodded and watched with an easy stare as he ushered the girl inside. Juliette had a timid step, although she seemed far less perturbed by the Duscurian giant at her side than she did from the glum green-haired urchin sulking three paces leftwards of Caterina’s off-center desk.

“Go on, then, little dove. What is it?”

“Captain,” the woman peeped. “I don’t... It’s nothing, really.” She peeked up at Piero again, her lips tucked into a pitiful pout. Piero frowned and rested his palm against her shoulder to urge her on.

“I like sweet nothings,” Caterina promised her. “Come here. Come sit. Let’s talk. It needn’t be about anything too terribly important. You seem the type to be good company.” She waved at a nearby chair cocked at a crooked angle. Juliette sniffed and looked to Piero a final time before she slunk forward to take a seat.

“I,” the girl attempted finally. “I work in the kitchens, Captain. With missus Anna-Marie.”

“I know you do,” Caterina answered. “You made the tarts, didn’t you? When we found those apples in Boramas? They were delicious.”

Juliette flushed a pretty pink.

“Yes, Captain,” she muttered. She turned a pinchful of her skirts between her fingers. “I’m so pleased you liked them, Captain.”

“The best I’ve ever eaten. But you haven’t just come to talk about tarts, now have you? Although I wouldn’t mind it. Anything that isn’t salted, gods help us. But if there’s something else on your mind, sweetling, I would very much wish to hear it.”

Juliette nodded. Her eyes centered on the bare tips of her toes.

“There was a man,” she whispered, “who came into the kitchens. I sleep there, see. Mind the coals. He... He wasn’t _kind_.” She sniffed again, rubbing at her nose with her sleeve. Caterina felt her jaw clench tight at the sight of purpled fingerprints bruised around her slender wrist.

“Alright, darling,” Caterina told her, forcing her voice gentle and soft. “That’s alright. That’s enough. I understand. You know his face? Can you point him out to me?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Good. Good girl. Come on, then. We’ll be quick as anything.”

Caterina rose from her desk and quickly skirted it to string her arm around the girl’s trembling shoulders. She hugged her tight into her side, looking over the crown of her head to match Piero’s steely gaze. He nodded and joined her pace as they left the room behind. Caterina heard her castaway grunt as he scrambled to keep up with their sudden exit, but she’d lost the taste for the humor of their predicament to think about him too closely. 

She led them up the creaking steps to the height of the helm. Juliette quivered under her arm as she led her to the railing overlooking the deck below.

“Show me,” she whispered into the girl’s ear. “Point out who it was.”

Juliette hesitated for a moment longer before slowly raising her arm to signal the man who’d hurt her. Caterina felt a fire catch light in her gut at the sight of him; some broad-stomached man she didn’t recognize as well as she did the crew who’d served her longer. He had the same shade of hay-colored hair that she did, although his was cropped short to his skull. At that minute he was busy taking a swig of ale, his free hand propped against his hip in a cocky pose as he told a ring of men some sort of bawdy story. Caterina could hear their laughter even at her height.

“I see him.”

She pressed her lips against the crown of the girl’s hair before gently nudging her in Piero’s direction.

“Take her to Naima, would you? And bring her things to the women’s bunk afterwards. I’ll sleep by the coals myself if I have to. No need for this sort of nonsense.”

“Captain,” Piero answered with a nod. Juliette shrunk into his shadow as he led her back towards the stairs once more.

“What are you—” her castaway started as she lurched forward into a new jog towards the deck. She ignored him, her hands already slipping to her hips as she made quick work of the _Snake_ ’s long belly to meet the man Juliette had pointed out. He didn’t see her advance at first, but jumped to face her when she squeezed her triggers and sent the first volley cracking into the air.

“Storytelling, are you?” she barked at the ring of men. They stared back at her slack jawed, their hands raised in surprise as she nocked back the hammer of her rightward pistol and pointed it at their ringleader. “I love a good story. Spare one for me, won’t you?”

“Captain,” the man stuttered, his face blanching before it turned flush. “I don’t—”

“Don’t like them yourself? Pity, that. Ah, but don’t bother with explaining. I can see it. Mm. I can _smell_ it on you. Forget the literary. You like _real_ , pretty things, don’t you? Who could blame you? I like them, too. A sweet little honeypot to stick your nose into, eh? And the way I see it, it’s the sort of thing that you can eat and eat for days without ever getting sick of it. You’re a big fellow — look at you. You must have quite the appetite. Do you want to fuck me, too? I’m not so pretty, but I can promise you that I’ve got the parts.”

“Wha-”

She squeezed the trigger before he had the luxury of finishing the word. The smell of salt peter stung her nose as she watched him crumple forward. A cry rang out across the deck, and loudest among the men at the dead man’s side. They hunched forward in a cower, crying out once more when she set her sights on them next.

“Any of you hungry, too?”

“No, Captain!” 

“Oh, but I am,” she challenged, her voice crackling into lightning between her teeth. “And so are the sharks. Maybe they’ll give us some wind if we feed them. What do you think?”

“No, Captain!”

“So then do your fucking work before I reconsider the terms of your fucking contract.” She waved at the red slick spreading across the deck. “Clean this up. This is a proper fucking ship, isn’t it? Have some fucking dignity.”

“Yes, Captain!”

She spun on her heel and stormed back towards the stern before the men had the chance to grovel any further. The rest of the crew watched her as she stalked. They all bowed their heads in deference as she made her way back into the shadowed quiet of the aft cabin.

Piero was waiting for her. He was alone. She slammed the door once her castaway had darted inside and continued on in the motion to snatch up an empty bottle to dash against the far wall.

“Fucking doldrums,” she snarled. She heard Piero hum in agreement. “That girl. She was from the _Dolphin_ , wasn’t she?”

Piero nodded. Caterina swallowed another searing breath full of unspoken curses.

“Fuck. Round up the rest of them as well. I don’t want anyone getting any ideas. A single roaming finger and I’ll flay the skin from it myself. Understood?”

“Captain,” Piero agreed in his low baritone. She locked her gaze on him for long enough that he understood she wanted to be alone. “I’ll see to it.”

“Thank you,” she managed to choke out as he turned to leave her behind.

“Fuck,” she sighed again when he had gone. Then she turned and spotted her castaway staring back at her. She puffed out a rueful breath before sinking into her chair. Then she pinched the bridge of her nose, locking her gaze on nothing for a moment as she collected herself.

“The _Blue Dolphin_ ,” she said some time later. Maybe he was listening to her. Maybe he wasn’t. She didn’t really give a damn. “Was an old barge from the south of the continent. Hailed itself as a pleasure craft, but who knew they took the term so literally. The crew snatched up village girls from coast when they docked for supplies. Filled them with poison and had their way with them. Fifteen of them in total, the poor little fools. I couldn’t leave them when I found them there, but what a den I threw them in to bring them here.” She shook her head. “Brigid will be no better, although I suppose it won’t be worse. Gods. Just when you think you’ve got the trick of it.”

“The trick of what?”

Caterina glanced down from her study of the rafters at his question. She felt her lips quirk into a woeful smile.

“Protecting what few things which deserve it.”

He frowned and looked away, but didn’t answer.

* * *

“Let me free.” 

“Good morning to you, too, Dirty-Hair,” Caterina drawled. It was day eight of this: the world’s most boring duet. At least this time he’d waited long enough for the first fingers of the dawn to creep through the window. She watched a dust mote pirouette through the gold of it, lazy just like she felt. The wind was returning, but only slowly. In the meantime they’d painted a new coat of varnish on the forward deck. Dirty-Hair had made a fine attempt at fitting over a dozen men in mended shirts. No one else had done anything stupid enough for her to shoot them, so all in all she supposed that things were looking up.

“Don’t call me that.”

“Then tell me your name,” she droned on, rolling her eyes.

“Cichol.”

“It’s a hex,” she sighed. “There’s no key. You know how to earn your freedom, so why don’t you—”

“My name,” he interjected. “My name is Cichol.”

Her chest seized tight at the idea. Was that a victory? Really? She bent forward from her slack-limb hang in the hammock to stare him down.

“ _Keyhole_?”

“It’s not,” he scowled, “not like _that_. _Cichol_.”

“ _Cichol_ ,” she tested. It was an awkward mouthful. “What’s that? Does it mean something in sea-dragon?”

“I’m not a sea dragon,” he countered tightly.

“ _Him-with-the-puckered-lips-of-an-a—_ ”

“Forget it,” Cichol, once Dirty-Hair, snapped. “If you’re just going to make a further mockery of me then I won’t bother playing your ridiculous games.”

“Aw, _Key_ ,” Caterina crooned, pressing her palm against her chest with contrition. “Do I seem the sort to make a mockery out of anything? I think it’s a lovely name.”

He glared back at her through the net of his knotted hair. Green as his eyes were, they looked nearly red with anger now. She laughed.

“And I appreciate you telling me the truth,” she added. “I suspect it’s because you’ve come to understand that I’m not so rotten a fruit, eh? Rough around the edges maybe, but then again, so are you. Do you think this means you’ll take a bath?”

“Not if you’ll be there to watch me do it.”

“Goodness,” she teased, her voice crumbling into a giggle. “Are you really the bashful sort? Don’t worry. I’ve already seen all the kit and tack. Not so terrible, you know, although I won’t fib and say I’ve never seen better.”

“You’ve already—” he sputtered, “—as if it was by _my_ doing that you _trapped_ _me_ in your _nets_!”

“I thought I saved you from drowning from your ill-fated ship?”

A knock at the door interrupted Cichol just as he had leapt from his hammock to protest her newest contention. Caterina’s cheeks ached from grinning when she watched a confused look spread across Piero’s face as he peeked his way inside.

“Captain,” he greeted her, his voice as unruffled as always. “Good morning to you.”

“Good morning, Piero,” she chirped. “You’re looking spry today.”

“Hm,” said Piero. “News for you.”

“Yes?” She waved her fingers at him, always slightly annoyed that he so loved the theatrics of serving as a second-in-command. “It’s a torture, you know. Do go on.”

“Sails have been spotted on the horizon. Two masts and flying Albinean banners.”

“Piero,” Caterina gasped, her heart already in her throat. “ _Wonderful_. How long has it been there? You’ve been keeping this from me, have you? Naughty as ever.” She slipped from her hammock, grabbing for her gun belt and shrugging on her jerkin with the same smooth motion. “Everyone’s seen them, I wager. Are they hungry for it?”

“Of course. I’ve started the necessary preparations.”

“Mm, I could _kiss_ you,” she replied, although she gripped his arm into a quick hug instead. The last thing Piero wanted was to kiss a woman. She’d learned this lesson the hard way, heartbroken as she’d been. “You gorgeous bastard. Come on then. You too, Key, unless you’ve decided to give up the ghost after all of this trouble.”

“My name is—” Cichol yelped, chasing after her before she’d broken their four-step tether. The rest of it was swallowed up by the crew’s hearty cry as their captain emerged onto the deck.

“Oh, lovelies,” she cried out. “What a morning, eh? Doesn’t the sun just feel splendid? The wind in your hair? I tell you, there’s nothing better than this, am I right?”

The crew roared with a single voice, the deck sparkling with their drawn swords.

“And yet we haven’t had a proper meal in ages, now have we? What cruel and thoroughly unfair luck! But let me tell you — even the unlucky ones find luck once in a while, don’t we?”

“Yah!” The crew’s rabble replied. She felt Cichol tense beside her. Maybe she owed him an explanation, but she was far more focused on the gallop of her heart instead.

“So let’s break our fast, shall we?”

Her men bellowed their agreement loud enough to make her ears ring. She laughed and fired off a celebratory shot aimed at the peaks of the _Snake_ ’s masts just as the boys in the crow’s nest let loose the frigate’s flag. The black banner unfurled with a crack against the wind.

“Black,” she heard Cichol mutter. She answered him by dancing forward against the drumbeat of the canons rumbling to life below their feet. Cichol dashed after her, as pale and goggle-eyed as he’d been when she’d first fished him from the sea.

“What are you doing?” he insisted when they crashed against the railing. The _Sea Snake_ cut through the waves at a breakneck pace, making quick work of the gulf between them and the merchant brigantine still turning in surprise at their bow. “What do you mean to do to that ship?”

Caterina’s answer was swallowed up by the burble of her unbridled laughter. She couldn’t help it — not in moments like these when her blood was on fire and her teeth were on edge. Her no-reply was punctuated by the boom of a canon and the crack that followed after when the ball crashed through the distant brigantine’s hull.

“A pirate,” Cichol breathed on her behalf, his voice dipping into a deep register which nearly disappeared against the din. “You’re a gods damned _pirate_.”

“Darling,” she told him with a grin, “I’m the worst of them.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please come say hello on twitter @fouxdogue — and if you’re interested, [check out some sketches of our lovely hero Captain Caterina and Cichol as totally-not-a-sea-serpent](https://mobile.twitter.com/fouxdogue/status/1246511988727037953)


	2. Soap and Wine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahoy, 
> 
> Please note that I’ve made the executive decision that people from Brigid are known as “Briggans”, because “Brigidians” (Brigidanders?) just sounds awful.

“You can’t keep quiet forever.”

Caterina said the words, but she wasn’t quite certain if she meant them. Plenty of people kept quiet forever: monks, madmen, the dead. Cichol seemed more than ready to join their number. With time she’d likely find his silence frustrating, but at that moment it still had the freshness to be entertaining. And so despite the man’s bitter glare she grinned and carried on in prying open a crate plucked from the hulled brigantine still smoldering at their starboard side.

“Ah,” she continued, shrugging off the loosened boards with a clatter as she leaned elbows-first into her bounty. Rows upon endless rows of stout glass jars glittered back at her, lit scarlet from the setting sun. Her adrenaline had finally begun to ebb away, but the sight of the spices at her fingertips made her heart drum fast again. She was going to be so fucking _rich_.

“Ha!” Naima added, having finally emerged from the belly of the _Snake_ now that it was clear that their most recent battle had come to an end. She was like a shadow — quiet, and everywhere, and nowhere. Maybe the crew was right. Maybe she _was_ a witch. “Look here. You don’t mean to keep all of that to yourself, do you?”

“Of course not,” Caterina replied. She snatched one of the jars, shaking it aloft and watching as the tangle of red-cadmium stamens twirled inside. “Some for the boys, some for the girls... some for wicked little creatures like you. What do you want, my darling? Come here, let me rub some vanilla in your pretty hair.”

Naima rolled her eyes.

“You’ll be rubbing nothing on me, thank you very much,” she answered neatly, although she still took a jar of the stuff in question. Saffron was better, but Caterina had already staked her claim. She supposed that she owed Naima some of those fragrant pods in exchange for all of the trouble of keeping them alive. Anise and cinnamon for Piero; lavender for Juliette, who’d shocked them all by pushing a man twice her size off the bow after he’d been stupid enough to sneak himself onboard; bundles of rosemary for the cannon-keepers; pink salt and pepper for the rank and file. There was a hierarchy to everything at sea, after all, and particularly in the art of treasure-keeping.

“Nothing?” Caterina pouted through her grin. “A pinch of something sweeter, then.”

Naima clacked her jar against Caterina’s.

“You really think I’m the sort to make that mistake twice?” the Almyran tutted. She turned from Caterina before her captain had the chance to reply, her focus now directedentirely on the task of piling as many jars into her arms as she could manage. “Your heart’s so sweet and generous at sea, Tomcat, but as soon as you see Brigid on the horizon you change that tune of yours.”

“Oh, my little nectarine,” Caterina huffed, but Naima remained steadfast. She turned her heel on her, jars jingling like bells in her arms.

“It’s not that I’m not one to share, just that I’m not a gods-damned _samaritan_ ,” Naima told her in a dry farewell. “I like you better when you’re lonely. Come find me once your heart’s been broken.”

“You’re the one who’s done all of the breaking,” Caterina laughed. Naima shuffled her prize to wave a single finger in her direction as she strode back into the perfumed depths of her lair. Then Caterina shook her head, whistling an idle tune as she finished taking stock of the crate’s deep belly.

“Don’t give me that look,” she ordered Cichol afterwards. “Here, hand that over.”

She waved at a sack strewn empty across the deck. He frowned. It was a bit of a conundrum, really: it wasn’t as if he’d signed a contract with her, and so it wasn’t really in her rights to order him around. At the same time, she’d hardly considered the ethical implications of stringing him to her arm. And it wasn’t as if she’d gone to all of the trouble of suffering his ill-tempered company just to let him free. Not that she was so certain just when she meant to do the freeing — just that she knew it couldn’t be forever, but that the time most certainly wasn’t now.

“Be a good sport,” she begged him. His glower grew ever fuller with sludge. He cast quite the image, to be honest: his long hair matted beyond repair and his face splattered with the gore she’d cast in her wake as they’d cut through the brigantine. He’d been nothing but a useless hanger-on for the whole affair, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t look like some sort of demon conjured by the carnage now.

“Please,” she punctuated more sharply. His lips pinched. She heard him draw in a deep breath before he slowly turned and bent to pick the sack from the boards. He waved it limply, perfunctorily. She took it with a theatrical bow, fluttering her lashes at him as she snapped it open with a flick of her wrist and began to pile the clattering collection of saffron inside.

“Thank you, Key,” Caterina told him nicely. Two, four, six, eight; twenty gold, forty, six-for-one-twenty. Her fingertips tingled with the ghosting touch of the coins she’d fill her pockets with once they finally docked in Brigid. It would have been a moment of pure triumph if Cichol’s stormcloud hadn’t been there beside her. She peeked upwards from her counting to look at him again.

“Spice trade,” she offered. “Lucrative work. Better than anything other than bullion, you know — and even then it’s lighter, easier to carry, so maybe it takes first place.”

She cinched the top of the sack closed and heaved the weight of it over her left shoulder. Cichol lurched forward to keep pace as she turned to weave her way through the crew’s scavenging in order to hunt out a spot to bury her prize.

“Do you know where it comes from?” Caterina asked over her shoulder. She didn’t expect him to reply, although she did wait a moment for it; it seemed only right, after all — she’d always been fond of the choreography of a good conversation. “It used to be Brigid, but the people of Brigid aren’t good businessmen. They make gods of nearly everything there — aren’t too keen to blaspheme, either. That sort of thing makes a person grow what they need and nothing more, and you don’t turn much of a profit off of _nothing more_ , eh? So some intrepid men from the continent named themselves _curious_ and learned everything they could from Brigid, and then they stole some of her richest seeds and set up a nice place for themselves back home. Now they grow more spice than what needs spicing, and do you know who grows it for them?”

Cichol didn’t answer. That was alright. She was quickly becoming accustomed to talking to herself.

“Little hands,” she continued breezily. “Better for all of that careful work — you don’t want to crush it, you know; the tender leaves and all of that. Saffron isn’t some sort of turnip you can just toss into a pile, you understand? And no one has littler hands than children, and those old, backwater villages south of Oghma? They have plenty of children. The rest is just arithmetic — subtraction and addition.”

His frown darkened further as he understood her implication. Caterina shrugged. She’d thought about the horror of stolen childhoods — had seen it with her own eyes, lived it, maybe, even —enough not to be left breathless by the idea now.

“So if you’re going to chide me for stealing from the men who’ve stolen babes from their mothers’ breasts then I’d ask you to save us both the trouble and find a better subject for your lesser humors,” Caterina concluded with a wink. Cichol’s lips turned into something of a snarl.

“You killed those men,” he contended rustily. Her brows bounced at the sudden reintroduction of his voice. “They were just sailors. They had nothing to do with slavers.”

“Nothing to do?” Caterina whistled. “I don’t know about that. You might think the humble fly has nothing to do with the lion, but who do you think eats that lion up once he’s dead and rotten in the ground? Come here, come here,” she added, shifting the sack a little higher on her shoulder as she made a detour towards a milling group of men on the middle deck. She looked through the crowd for a moment until she saw a face she didn’t recognize.

“You!” Caterina cried out. They all turned to her, including the man she’d hunted out. She nodded her chin at him and watched as his sunburned cheeks filled with the recognition of being chosen. “You manned that brig, eh? Did you?”

“Y-yes,” he answered quickly.

“Yes, _Captain_ ,” she corrected him dryly. He flinched.

“Yes, Captain.”

She waved him over. He obliged, dragging off his cap for good measure as he tried to mimic whatever obedient pose that would further extend his lifespan while aboard the _Snake_. This was unnecessary, of course, but that didn’t mean she didn’t appreciate the theatre.

“Look here, Key,” she instructed neatly. She tugged up one of the man’s short-sleeves. A brand in the shape of a horseshoe stared back at them, still pink and slightly raised. “Do you know what that means?”

Cichol said nothing, although the crease between his brows nearly answered for him.

“It means that he wasn’t going to fight us when we boarded. Not him nor any of the poor bastards marked the same. That’s just arithmetic, too. You wouldn’t die for the man who’d burned you, would you? And he’s lucky for it,” she added, clapping the man on the shoulder. “Sometimes they just take out tongues.”

She turned again, quick to correct her route back to her new quarters. Cichol lurched to keep at her heels.

“I don’t brand my men,” she promised him as they walked. This time her voice had lost all of its charm; was serious and stony. “And you can be well fucking sure that I don’t butcher them.”

“You expect me to believe that you only killed those who deserved it today, and that you’re some sort of savior to the rest?”

She laughed. He was clever, she had to give him that — and it was a relief, really, that she wasn’t locked limb-to-limb with an ignoramus.

“Of course not,” she admitted as they both ducked into the aft cabin. She slung the sack into a corner and rolled the sore ache of her shoulder loose. Then she turned and flagged her palms at him, grinning as she did. “In a different life I suppose it could’ve been the sea’s first ship of liberty, that old brig we took today. It’s not as if I can smell fair labor on the winds. And as soon as I saw her I wanted her, and I take what I want, you understand? But I’m not just some animal. I think about things before I reach for them — not going to grab an iron hot from the fire, as it so happens. I might not be a scholar, but I’ve lived long enough to learn _that_. Do you know how I decide it? What I’ll take, and what I leave behind?”

He settled into his usual frown. _No_ , that look told her, but she wasn’t of a mind to leave him uneducated. She tapped her temple, still smirking as she did.

“Reason, little fish. I run the odds. I might still be green, but I’ve seen enough of this life to know what’s most likely wicked and what’s most likely good. Why else do you think my men follow me so nicely? It’s not for my rare beauty, eh?” She laughed. “We all just want to do the right thing, in the end.”

She slung herself into her hammock before Cichol had the chance to reprimand her. Or maybe he wouldn’t; no, it seemed as though he’d keep his silence for another night. Maybe now it’d lost some of its charm. And here she was thinking that they’d perhaps progressed beyond the battlefields of their first introduction.

But, then again, maybe she deserved it. After all, she’d lied to him. It was true that she’d seen plenty of the world — the frozen parts and the dried out ones, and all of the wet nothingness in between — but she’d fibbed when she said that it’d taken the luck of odds and logic to survive it. No, it was far simpler than that. _Think of it like an apple_ , she might have explained to him if he’d been more diplomatic with her; _and think of an apple as_ probability _. Maybe when you pluck it it’ll be sweet — maybe you’re too early and it’ll still be sour. Like two sides of a coin, right? Heads or tails. Except that you’re not playing against a fair bet. It’s a trick coin. A weighted dice. Cut open that apple and no matter how many you pick, you’ll always find the same stuff inside: rot. Worms. All the way to the godsforsaken core._

* * *

Brigid. Gods. It looked as beautiful as she remembered it. White sands, green cliffs; life, life, life! Caterina had been breaking her bread with sweaty deckhands and the occasional rat for far too many fucking weeks. The gulls squawking above them sounded like godsdamned sirens, now, and that said nothing for the beauties that made their beds in the town nestled in the crook of the cove they’d just made anchor in. 

“Look at it,” she breathed, and even freshly-mute Cichol couldn’t help but hum in agreement. To be fair, he’d been given a good day to look the island over. The sky was clear and the sun was strong but not overpowering. The wind was good too, finally; had shortened the last leg to the lowest button of the Brigid archipelago to a tolerable two days. Now their wandering journey had finally come to an end. Caterina could hardly stop herself from leaping into the bay far before her men had managed to drop their ragtag collection of dinghies and skiffs into the water. 

“Where are we?”

She wasn’t surprised that curiosity tempted Cichol talking again, although she was enamored with his use of the collective _we_. She gave him a bright smile for his trouble, which of course just made him frown.

“Kalanka. Funny name, eh? Some say it means _sea-daughter_ in Briggan, but don’t let them pull the wool over your eyes,” she told him. He cocked one of his crooked brows. “ _Sand flea_ ,” she added with an extra twist of her grin. “ _Sand flea_ is what it really is, for us few who actually speak the language. Not so poetic but far more fitting — plenty of the little bastards here. In any case, it’s not some capital or anything like that, before you think you’re about to plea your case to the King of Brigid for your mistreatment. Just an old watering hole.”

“And you’re going to pillage it, too, is that it?”

She laughed. Was that a joke? Maybe she was warming up on him after all.

“Hardly. Here’s _why_ we pillage — Kalanka and all of its rewards. Of course, Brigid proper isn’t much fond of folks like us, but sweet old Calosus certainly is. He’s the — well, the mayor, I suppose the word would be. Vice chancellor, maybe. I don’t know, I suppose it varies from place to place. What do you call them from where you come from? Merry mermen?”

He looked as though he’d just swallowed a lemon. The sight made her far giddier than perhaps it should have — just that he cast such an _image_ all salt-caked and miserable and pouting as he was.

“Well, whatever it is,” she added with the wave of her hand, “how I deal with it here is by sending sweet Calosus a nice little purse from time to time. Think of it as a retainer. The real bounty comes for him when we anchor at his shores. Not that we’re the only crew to do it, but let me tell you honestly that we’re always the best behaved. It’s like... It’s like those little fish that live in a shark’s mouth, eh? Eating up all the little bits that’d make a mess of his fine teeth otherwise. _Mutually beneficial_.”

Cichol rolled his eyes, no doubt sensing that her teasing about his seaworthiness had bled through into this next metaphor.

“I don’t know if we’re the sharks or the fishes, but what I can tell you for certain is that you’re in for a good time.”

She winked. If he hadn’t been doing it already, no doubt Cichol would have frowned.

* * *

“Well, if it isn’t the Tomcat,” Calosus greeted them at the shore. The nostalgia of his thick, melodic accent nearly made her eyes water. “Still in one piece, I see.” 

“And I see that you’re fatter than ever, you old bastard,” Caterina laughed, dancing through the ankle-depths of the surf as she jogged forward to meet him in his place along the dunes. She clasped his forearm, giving it a ferocious squeeze just like he did to her.

“What better sign of good living?” Calosus laughed as well. “And you’re skinnier than ever,” he added, clicking his tongue as he stepped back a pace to look her over.

“Worse than that,” she promised him. “Nearly lost a few toes this time. Tricky, men from Morfis — when push comes to shove, you know?”

“Soon enough you’ll need a peg,” he countered. She snorted at the idea.

“Food or fittings, no better place for it than here.”

“You’re right about that,” he agreed with another bellyful of laughter. “And more than happy to oblige, of course. We saw your sails. I’ve set up the longhouses for your men. See that they don’t go pissing in the corners, would you?”

“Calosus,” she tutted as they both turned to begin their slow hike through the sand. “You know that I housebreak all of them. Ah,” she added quickly, “that reminds me. We picked up a bit of an addition on the way here. Thirty of them, give or take one or two. You know the game. Some of them have already shown an interest in signing on, but I’ll leave the rest of them to you. I’m supposing most of them will want a way north and’ll work for it, if there’s anything proper to be done. If any misbehave just say the word.”

“You and your castaways,” Calosus sighed. His pale eyes peeked over her shoulder at the glum figure following behind. “That one of them, too?”

“Who, Key? Oh no, he’s better than that. A proper seaman, him.” She turned and nearly strung her arm around Cichol before she read the vitriol in his glare. No, perhaps better to keep her hands to herself. She laughed in place of it, shoving her thumbs into her gun belt as she swaggered on.

“And what’s Piero think about that?” Calosus snuffed.

“My heart in its entirety belongs to Piero,” she answered piously. Calosus laughed again.

“I wouldn’t tell your Almyran that.”

“A bath,” Caterina interjected before the Briggan had thoroughly demolished what was left of her reputation. “I could use a bath. Or are you just going to toss me to the streets and have me sing for my quarter?”

“I might,” Calosus supposed aloud. “You’ve always had a touch for the dramatic. In the meantime I’ve made up your usual apartments — although who can be certain why. No doubt you’ll make a ruin of them.”

“Don’t listen to him, Key,” she diced. “I’m a fantastic guest. Come, let’s show him, shall we?” She swooped forward into an overdone bow, fluttering her fingers at Calosus as she made her farewell. “Piero has been going on about tea for days, by the way. No doubt he’ll find you next. And I know you’ll both squirrel yourself away into doing something dreadfully boring for days, so I suppose it was nice to see you.”

“Until tomorrow, Tomcat,” Calosus acquiesced with a wink. They’d finally drudged their way to the more dense-packed sand that made up the town’s well-traveled streets. It took all of her better nature not to break into a run to drench herself in all of it. 

* * *

“Gods,” Caterina she groaned after they’d hiked their way through Kalanka’s serpentine streets, up its steep hills and switchback corners and finally into the jasmine-scented courtyard of her private apartments, and then deep into the depths below it that made up the baths. There weren’t so many places like it in the islands. Usually if you dug you just brought up water, but she’d chosen that plot herself a half-dozen years before because it was situated over a rare collection of limestone that had allowed her to dig in a proper pool. It wasn’t nearly as large as the ones offered in the east, perhaps, but it at least meant that she didn’t have to drag bucketfuls of water from the island’s wells whenever she had the rare luxury of washing herself. 

Despite all of his questionable humor, Calosus had done well by her after he’d seen her sails on the horizon. The low-backed cellar of a room was already filled with crackling candles and towels and red-fleshed fruits and, far more importantly, a silver spill of water still steaming from some unseen fire.

“I’ll marry him,” she wondered aloud. “Each and every one of his bellies, so help me.”

She sighed, slow and delighted, and worked the buckle of her gunbelt loose. It was only when she’d let it _clunk_ to the floor that she remembered her green-haired ghost.

“Ah,” she quickly amended. “You can go first. To be honest I think I have a bit more of a rind than you.”

He stared back at her silently through the sleepy gloom. She couldn’t see too much of him, to be completely honest, although she had a good idea of what sort of look he was giving her. She sighed. Yes, the charm was beginning to fade.

“Suit yourself.”

She took the time to light a few more candles in order to hunt out what she needed for a proper bath: soap, as white as cream and studded with anise stars that looked so delectable that she nearly wanted to pop it into her mouth; a comb to work out the matted strands of her hair, although given the state of it she’d likely have to shear half of it off like some sort of wretched lamb left too long to pasture; oils smelling like sandalwood and spice that would at least give her some sort of allure for her nighttime affairs. Afterwards she picked apart the stiff laces holding the front of her jerkin tight and peeled it off, her lip curling slightly at how the petrified leather kept the shape of her body even after it had fallen to the floor.

So maybe she’d been at sea for a little too long.

She stepped out of her boots next — they were the best-off of everything, to be honest, barefoot as she usually was to keep herself steady in the rigging — and then pulled at the ties of her breeches. Cichol cleared his throat. She remembered again that he was still there; stubbornly existing in those moments in which it would have been far more convenient if he wasn’t.

It was a small room. He’d gotten good at hiding within his four-paced tether, but unless he wanted to dive into the pool he had few other options. Apparently he’d made the decision to shield himself behind his hair, his glower peeking from within it like a pair of eels lurking in a mess of kelp. Caterina snorted and crossed her arms over her chest, gripping at the thin-worn hem of her shirt before dragging it over her head. Once she was free of it she looked back at him and found that he’d turned newly crimson behind his hairy hide.

“Oh, don’t bother with that,” she drawled. “You’ll see far better later.”

It wasn’t humility that made her say it; it was simply the truth. She’d once been rather pretty. After all, her mother had been a whore — and whores didn’t live for very long if they weren’t nice to look at. Her father’d even said that Caterina took after her like a twin until she’d gotten too cocky at age twelve and had squared off against an overgrown buzzard armed with nothing but overconfidence and a rusted pitchfork. The monster had nearly ripped her head clean from her shoulders for the trouble. Its wicked talons had left two deep gashes above her right ear, blessing her with a pink patch of scalp that never grew over again and a long, thin scar that continued from her temple across the bridge of her nose.

And that had come _before_ she’d become a seaborne scourge. At thirteen she’d started scrubbing decks and winding rope on a slow old bucket of a ship called the _Resilient Ranger_ ; six months later she’d fallen from the rigging and broken her left leg, leaving a purple comma on her shin where the bone had torn through. At nineteen some bastard had thrown an oil lantern at her over a drunken spat and set her on fucking _fire_ , turning the skin of her left shoulder into crackling before she’d doused herself with the ale that had started the whole fiasco. Her back was still shiny and waxen even after the eleven eventful years that had followed.

Cichol was doing his very best to ignore perhaps the most infuriating feature on her long ledger of marks and blemishes, and here was the story for that: at twenty four, right after she’d adopted the _Sea Snake_ , once called the _Maiden Elise_ , she’d been in the middle of seizing a new bounty when a clever fellow had dashed forward and slashed her clean across the chest with the swing of a curve-bladed sword. She’d taken his head for the trouble, but the damage had already been done — a new diagonal scar spanning from her right shoulder (the unburned one, which somehow made it worse) to the pit of her left arm. The curve of her left breast had helped it make a detour in order to lob off her godsdamned nipple along the way. As if she weren’t to be contented with simply being half-fucking- _bald_ and mean-tempered: honestly, it had been an insult far more than it had been an injury.

In any case, the men and women both of Kalanka’s pillow-houses would have perfect tits, bless them, so no need for Cichol to become too infatuated with her poorer offering now. All the same, he looked as though he was ready to tumble over when she stripped off her breeches — and that was fair, she supposed; there was nothing wrong with her ass, at least.

“Oh, gods help us,” she groaned as she slipped into the pool. It was marvelous. Divine. Surely she’d never sail again. She was rich enough, wasn’t she? So maybe she’d just live down here. Pay pretty creatures to warm her water for her and feed her grapes and suckling pig and whatever the hell else they wanted. Anything for soap — gods, _soap_ , and look how it cut through the varnished grime on her arms as if she hadn’t been scrubbing at it so futilely with salt-crusted rags for weeks — and fresh, sweet, steaming, miraculous _water_.

Well. No. She wanted more than that. She sunk a little deeper into the pool, her pleased hums echoing into the depths as the surface crested just below her nose. And to that point... She eased herself up again and hunted for the sight of Cichol sulking in the corner.

“Get in, would you?”

“Excuse me?” The shock of the question forced him into speaking again. His voice echoed like a drumbeat against the damp walls.

“I think,” she answered slowly, nearly drunken from the heat, “that you’ll turn this into a proper fucking circus if I let you have your way with it. Let’s go for the abridged version. I’m desperate for a good meal, and unfortunately I’ll go nowhere without you in attendance. So get in. There’s plenty of room. Don’t worry. I don’t bite.”

“I think not,” he replied, although she didn’t think he was talking about _biting_. She grinned toothily all the same.

“Here. I’ll close my eyes. Not for the whole bloody thing, but enough for you to get undressed, since apparently that’s an act of blasphemy of which I was previously unaware. I have more important things to do than to stare at your cock underwater.”

“No,” he choked. She seriously considered whipping that delightful bar of soap at his head.

“You smell nearly as bad as I do and look twice as horrible. No one will let you step a foot inside of any place here. It’s civilized, you know? Bad enough that you walked through town like that as it is.”

“I had no option,” he answered tightly, “as you are _well_ _aware_.”

“And you have no option now, either,” she sighed. She closed her eyes. “So come on. Look. Do you see? I can’t, but that’s the idea.” She listened to the silence filling the room. “ _Key_. Three-quarters of my crew are men. Do you have any idea how many dicks I’ve seen? And not to mention the fact that I’ve already made the acquaintance of yours. I can promise you wholeheartedly that I am not—”

“Enough,” he sputtered. Her lips split into an ever-wider grin. “Enough already.”

She scrubbed the bar of soap between her palms, luxuriating in the suds while she listened to Cichol either preparing himself a noose or finally undressing himself. It was to be the latter, although she wasn’t certain if that made her life more or less complicated. Four beats later and she heard a slosh as he eased himself into the opposite end of the pool. She wasn’t certain just how he managed it, but somehow he kept his long legs from bumping into hers — no doubt coiled in on himself like an angry cat, she supposed, and soon confirmed by opening her eyes. He glared back at her, a pale smudge in the dim, and with his arms cocked into strange angles to hide as much of himself as he could muster.

“Well, you’ve managed it,” she commended him. “How does it feel?”

“Fine,” he grunted, which was, of course, a lie; she could see it in the way the wrinkles had melted from his brow. She laughed and tossed the soap at him, allowing herself to be impressed when he caught it instead of letting it splash at his side.

“Wash your hair,” she instructed, arching backwards to dip her own windblown locks into the water. “You look disgusting.”

He didn’t answer, but she liked to think that his harrumphing was a little softer, then; perhaps they were even becoming friends.

* * *

They were not friends. She was convinced, in fact, that Cichol had revealed himself to be her mortal enemy. 

“You said we were to go to a restaurant,” he sputtered, his fingers fisted at his sides, “not a _brothel_.”

“I see you haven’t been to many brothels,” Caterina replied. “They aren’t the sort to leave their patrons with empty bellies. Come on, Key, you look ridiculous,” which was the truth, braced as he was at the door to one of Kalanka’s more boisterous pillow-houses and making it impossible for anyone to enter (and most importantly, _her_ ). He also looked clean, which was a mercy for all of them — his hair finally stripped of salt and combed, even, although it was still loose against his shoulders and would no doubt be knotted again soon. The style (or lack thereof — although her own hay-colored tail left much to be desired as well) had something to do with his ears, she wagered, although she knew better than to ask him; that wasn’t something they’d built up the affinity to yet discuss, and at this rate she guessed it would be a mystery forevermore. 

“Absolutely not,” he hissed.

His stubbornness had slipped from novel into amusing and had then been expedited to absolutely _infuriating_ , particularly now that it meant that her various appetites were in danger of being left starved. She rolled her eyes and stormed forward, shouldering past the man into the perfumed entry beyond. Cichol was certainly the first fellow she’d ever met who would have preferred to die rather than slip his way into someone else’s sheets, but if that’s the way he wanted to go then far be it for her to stand in the path of destiny.

“Caterina!”

She’d never heard her name on his lips before. At least that meant that he was the enduring type.

“Play nice,” she chided him. “This isn’t the place for tantrums.” They’d spilled into a courtyard. The bath had taken far too long, filthy as they’d been, and so it was night proper now. She’d always liked the pillow-houses at night. The yard was strung with paper lanterns glimmering in the breeze, winking in harmony with the plucked strings played by a small company of girls scattered across the space. Beautiful creatures lounged in between all of it, men and women of every shape and shade and as bare as the day they’d been born save for the occasional artistic swipe of silk or the loop of a glittering ring.

Cichol bumped into her, too busy gawping to keep his feet moving in a proper line. _Honestly_.

“Tomcat!”

She was distracted from whatever punitive measure she owed him by the burble of birdsong. A woman emerged from the beneath the boughs of a willow to slink beside her, hugging Caterina’s arm against the swell of the most perfectly proportioned pair of breasts that the world — and certainly Caterina — had ever seen.

“Nezha,” Caterina cooed, suddenly nearly as coquettish as the coquette herself. “You remember me.”

“Of course I do,” Nezha purred. “How could I possibly forget?” She danced her painted fingers up Caterina’s forearm, peeking over her shoulder as she did. “And who’s this you’ve brought? How handsome.”

“Don’t make me jealous, little plum,” Caterina sighed. Nezha giggled as the sailor strung her arm low against her warm-skinned hip. “You know how I hate to fight for attention.”

“You do always do such a fine job of keeping it to yourself when you come here,” the courtesan countered, smiling like a portrait as she drug Caterina deeper into the yard. “Alesandro will be so glad to know you’ve come. Is there anyone else you’d like me to find?”

Caterina considered the offer. Part of her was as gluttonous as ever, but then the idea of a relatively quiet affair had some appeal — perhaps it had to do with the fact that she hadn’t had a moment of privacy to herself for days (or was it years?).

“You’re all I need, sugarling,” she reassured the woman afterwards. Nezha giggled at the obvious lie, ducking forward to bury the harmony of her laughter into Caterina’s shoulder.

“Of course,” Nezha continued, suddenly twice as sultry just with the space she’d taken away between them. “And what about him?”

Gods. Yes, that’s right. And what _about_ him?

“Someone pretty. No blondes,” she added, smirking as she looked back at Cichol and caught his horrified stare. “I think he’s seen enough of them with me for awhile. What do you want, Key? Nezha has a sister who’s got three-quarters of her looks. Would you like that?”

“I don’t,” he stammered, his cheeks twice as rose-burned as they’d been in the baths. Caterina huffed a sharp breath through her nose at the sight. He was so _impossible_.

“He doesn’t,” she supposed, shrugging at Nezha as they both attempted to strategize. “Give Alesandro to him, then; or the both of them. I don’t know, half the time I think you’re just being difficult for the fun of it, isn’t that right, Key? They’ll be gentle if you want it, you know — or not. Just use your words, for gods’ sake.”

“Caterina—” he attempted, but was startled quiet when the famous Alesandro spotted his most generous patron from the balcony above and hailed them all in his direction.

“‘Sandro!” Caterina skipped up the steps with Nezha still tangled in her arms, the two of them laughing from the heady anticipation of what was to come next. Cichol made some sort of grunting cry of displeasure at their skipping pace but what of it, anyways. Caterina allowed herself a bite of Alesandro’s cinnamon-colored skin instead, earning an amused huff as he then rubbed at his abused shoulder.

“Hungry as ever, Tomcat,” he observed. Caterina laughed.

“Always, wicked — and tell me, what have you brought to feed me?”

Apparently Calosus had prepared the brothel for her arrival as well as he had tidied up her bath. Alesandro clacked back a set of paneled doors to reveal a true cornucopia inside; fruits and carafes of ambrosial juices and huge, glittering decanters full of wine, and enough fair-faced creatures between them to crew a ship of their own.

Gods. She loved this town.

She dove into all of it like she did the sea. It quickly became a tangle — Nezha cooing at the new scars flecking Caterina’s arms and giving them all a conciliatory kiss while another darling with ink-black hair fed her sips of the sweetest port she’d ever tasted. She found the rump of someone’s thigh and chased it upwards, hungry for a different flavor after so many weeks of Naima’s fickle moods and hard-tack and salted mackerel. A girlish voice moaned at her roaming; Nezha giggled, her breath suddenly hot and close at the corner of Caterina’s jaw; Alesandro’s strong hands worked at her belt. She —

“Enough, that’s quite — no, thank you.”

— she ignored the perpetual huff of Cichol doing whatever it was that he was doing three and three-quarters paces away to slip her fingers into —

“No, I’m not — Caterina. _Caterina_!”

Here it was. She was going to kill him. This was going to be the end.

“What?” Caterina snapped, pulling back from the delightful cloud that had gathered around her to seek him out. “What could you _possibly_ want?”

Cichol didn’t answer. There really wasn’t a need for it. First came his pose, as absurd as it was pitiful: his hands gripped tightly on the shirt that a lovely girl with auburn hair was doing her best to strip from him, button-by-button, and only two of them undone; and the basket of green-skinned grapes he’d overturned as he’d tried to run from her, two of them crushed beneath his heel. That was where the frivolity of it ended. He took another step and Caterina felt the tug of his hex, the last warning before he’d start to burn — and then he took another, flinching into the hiss of the bewitchment in order to evade the vixen still clinging to him in confusion.

Caterina’s stomach sank. Gone were Cichol’s usual little grunts and grimaces, replaced by a proper look of something far more dire. She though for a moment of Juliette in her cabin, all shrinking looks and teary stares, and felt her heart turn into a tangle.

 _Shit_.

“Enough,” she groaned, not sanctimonious enough not to voice her disappointment at how the night had gone. “Alright. _Enough_.” She tossed herself sideways to close the gap between them to a safe four paces again, fixing her belt as she did and fishing a bag of coins from her pocket for good measure.

“Here,” she added, tossing it in Nezha’s direction. The courtesan fondled the weight of the bag with a bewildered stare. Caterina was of a mind to agree with her, but it didn’t seem as though she had the luxury of voicing the mood aloud. Instead she lurched to her feet, stumbling forward to snatch two bottles of wine from the table before tearing in Cichol’s direction.

“Come on,” she grumbled at him. She shouldered him forward for good measure, looking backwards at the stunned coterie only after they’d made it to the door.

“Enjoy a night off,” she offered them glumly. “I’ll see you again soon.”

“Tomcat,” Alesandro cried out, but Cichol had continued on in his advance down the stairs and so she had no option but to follow after. This was, of course, absolutely backwards, but it seemed as though the evening had already built its momentum in that very fashion. Caterina pulled the cork from one of the bottles with her teeth and swallowed an over-generous gulp to sate the burgeoning blossom of self pity blooming in her chest.

Cichol just kept on walking — through the yard, through the door, through the streets again. She was half certain he was readying himself to walk into the sea. Gods. But couldn’t she just have one night without being drenched in saltwater?

“Come here,” she grunted, cutting him short with a sudden dart down a sleepy side street. She slowed her pace until she saw that he meant to follow her. Then she took another burbling drag from her bottle, finding some solace in the pleasant buoyancy filling her legs as the rich stuff did its duty.

Caterina had finished the bottle by the time she found what she was looking for. The dense-packed soil of the road dissolved into a rocky loam beneath their feet. She picked over it carefully, taking extra notice of the crags as they formed into the peak ahead now that she’d finished that bottle. Soon they were at the summit of the hunchbacked cliff that overlooked the glitter of Kalanka below, empty except for the stars and an ugly old tree blown to grow nearly perpendicular by summer storms. She sat beneath it, leaning against the roughshod trunk as she set her first bottle aside and fiddled with the second. Cichol watched her wordlessly, perhaps wondering what she meant to do next, but when he saw it still meant drinking he finally settled enough to sit a body’s width beside her.

The bottle bubbled. A cricket chirped. Down below someone cried out, joined after by another celebratory shout. Caterina thought miserably about breasts and honey and the amorphous sense of guilt settling in her gut — one that she wasn’t entirely certain that she deserved.

“Tomcat,” Cichol offered finally, breaking the spell of the quiet night made dreamy by her dizzied drinking. “Why do they call you that?”

Caterina huffed a breath of laughter through her nose and nodded at the question.

“Tomcat,” she echoed. She took another drink. “With a name like mine every man wants to call you _kitten_. Doesn’t do much to give one a sense of authority, hm? Especially in a world like this.” That was the truth, but not all of it. Caterina considered the conundrum while she took another drag.

“My father,” she then added, no longer so dedicated to smoothing out the transitions in her storytelling, “was a captain. Not a crook,” she amended with the swing and the slosh of her bottle, “a proper captain. Took passengers. Never made enough money to keep us fed but that’s how it goes to be _proper_. So of course I wanted to be a captain, too. Not so many women in the business. _Bad luck_ , they used to say. So one day I cut off my hair and dressed myself in breeches and told ‘em he had a son. Not very convincing for my father, of course, but it was for the sailors I worked under once he drowned. Took ‘em years to realize I didn’t have a cock. Stupid bastards. I was pretty, then.” Another drink.

“Fought all the time, too,” she continued. “You had to — have to — that’s what it’s like. But if you fight enough of them, and win enough of those fights, they start to listen to you. When enough of them listened to me I stopped hiding myself. Only bad luck to be had then was for ‘em who thought they could stop me.” She smirked around the mouth of the bottle. “The name wasn’t meant to be a compliment, not at first, but I don’t mind it now.”

Cichol shook his head. This time it was her turn to frown.

“What’s that for?”

“Even when you were a little girl,” he countered, “you wanted to be a _pirate_?”

Caterina smirked.

“No,” she admitted. Her voice echoed into the bellows of the bottle. “But that isn’t really the right question. People like me, we don’t dream about the people we want to be. We dream about the things we need.”

She looked back at him and squinted to turn her double-vision back to single again. He looked alright in the dark; nice enough now that he was clean. She supposed it was that way with everyone, but good for him to get along.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he answered. Maybe it was honest. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the look of her just staring at him with neither of them left with anything to say. She shrugged.

“I was born in a desert,” she told him. “The kind that’s cold even in the middle of the day. People die there all the time, and for no good reason, just — _pah_ ,” she said with the flicker of her fingers. “You’re in a cage in a place like that. It’s not meant for living and so most don’t, or at least not for very long. How can you blame my father for wanting water? How can you judge me for taking what he never had?”

Cichol looked away. She took another drink.

“That — there — before,” she stumbled on. “With the girls. I didn’t think you’d hate it like that. It wasn’t as if I meant it just to make you miserable.”

“...I know,” he answered finally. Caterina sloshed the dredges of the bottle with the roll of her wrist.

“Was it — were you,” she endeavored on, her words starting to tangle far before they made it to her mouth now that she’d made such good progress on bottle number two. “You know,” she added lamely. Cichol frowned. “Did someone...?”

“No,” he sputtered, at last wise to what she meant. “No, nothing like that.” The silver blur of him turned a shade pinker in the dark. “I am... I am simply not accustomed to that sort of behavior.”

“A pirate’s life, eh? You took well enough to the plundering part,” Caterina scoffed.

“I most certainly did not,” he corrected her thinly. She laughed.

“Fine. Just one girl, next time, then.”

“I’d prefer not.”

“They have plenty of other types to pick from,” she then offered with a sigh, turning the bottle upwards and watching glumly as the mouth dripped dry. Then she sunk backwards, resting her head against the knobby roots beneath them as she stared upwards into the tree’s arthritic branches. “Whatever you want.”

“Hm,” he said. And then, later, “what will you do now?”

She blinked, realizing too late that she’d begun to drowse. She rubbed at her eyes, toying with his question while she did.

“Not what I _want_ , if you have your way with it,” she grumbled. She heard him huff, but in a way that seemed more amused than usual. Her lips quirked into a crooked grin. “Rest for a while. Get rid of my sea legs. You’ll go mad if you’re on the water for too long — start seeing things... Like silver serpents and sea monsters.”

“I see,” Cichol answered wryly.

“Rest the men, too. Some of them won’t want to continue on. We’ll have to find more for those that don’t. Then listen, you know? In the taverns, in the halls. Plenty of tired sailors come to Kalanka. I’ll learn what else out there is worth taking. I’ve been in warm waters for a long while, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go someplace cold. Even if you hate it you can still miss it, sometimes.”

“And me?”

She paused at the idea. Yes, that was the grand question, wasn’t it? The only problem was that she hadn’t yet prepared her answer. For some reason she felt as though she’d be letting the greatest prize she’d even won slip through her fingers if she let him free, and yet she wasn’t certain at just what sort of market she could possibly barter him.

“What do you want?” she asked him instead.“Where was it that you were going when I found you?”

She heard the shuffle of his boots as he scuffed his heels against the earth.

“Nowhere,” he admitted finally. On some tongues it would have been a stubborn reply, but for once on his it was merely honest. She nodded and closed her eyes.

“I know it,” she told him, her voice slurring into a lazy drawl. “I know the feeling.”

She felt the ebb and the flow of the tide against her shoulders. Even at their height she could still hear the sea. There was something comforting in the crash of the waves in just the same way that it was frightening — made her think of the calm and the quiet of those deep places where people sometimes went and never came back from. She let herself fall into it, sedate as she was thanks to the wine and the little truths she’d shared. In the morning she woke in her bed, still dressed except for the weight of her boots, and with the tidewater of Cichol’s sleeping breath keeping her company from the spot he’d made for himself on the floor.


	3. Black Sails

Caterina woke to the sound of a quill on parchment. The _scritch scritch scratch_ was unusual, to say the very least. She was far more familiar with the slosh of the sea. When she’d been a proper libertine she’d sometimes roused to the sound of flesh-on-flesh and gasps begging her to join. _Scritch scritch scratch_ wasn’t that. If anything it was three parts of four quarters to rats chewing up her lines, but there was something about it that left her feeling comfortable and drowsy instead of making her skin crawl.

It was Cichol, she guessed, that sound, and when she peeked open an eye she confirmed it. So here was the reason why he’d asked— well, if glowering and pointing could qualify as _asking_ —to move the desk from the drawing room into her sleeping quarters. He’d positioned it next to his little nest of pillows ( _just sleep in the bed_ , she’d grumbled countless times before, wincing at the thought of his long limbs tangled on the floor, but of course he hadn’t, not even after she’d made a sincere pledge not to touch him, not even with a roving toe) and below a window overlooking the bay that was always drenched with sunlight at dawn.

His hair caught the sun like a lagoon: shimmering, languid, lazy. She’d suggested that he braid it like she did hers but naturally he hadn’t, and no matter that Kalanka’s windy afternoons were always tugging on it. Instead she was forced to listen to him comb his hair in the dark each night while she settled herself to sleep, as if she enjoyed the lullaby of a full-grown man snarking under his breath at his knots. All the same, she was starting to have the sneaking suspicion that his lack of interest in coiffure was as much his steadfast protest of her every suggestion as it was born from his own sense of pride. They did look very pretty loose, those green locks of his.

“Are you writing?”

She yawned between each word of her question. Cichol turned — not quick and jolting like he once had but instead smoothly, and only after he’d finished writing his newest line, tapping his nib in the little ink pot at his elbow as he swiveled at the waist to face her.

“You’re awake,” he said, which didn’t really qualify as an answer. Caterina rubbed the grit from her eyes and stretched her legs beneath the sheets. There was something utterly divine about sleeping in a bed after so many nights spent hanging like an overripe fruit in her hammock. If she’d been a different woman perhaps she would have lingered for hours, lost daydreaming while she watched the sun rise in the shadows cast along the floor. Of course, she wasn’t that woman; was instead a creature prone to leaping out of her own skin if she stayed in one place for even a moment too long.

“Did you sleep well, my salty friend?”

She asked the question while she bent at the waist, folding further forward to reach for her toes in order to stretch a few pops and cracks from her spine. Next she slung her legs sidewards, ensuring that her nightgown (a new addition to her wardrobe) covered enough of her body so that Cichol wouldn’t lose his goddamned mind.

“Yes,” he answered, surprisingly collegial. “I found the rain soothing. Did you as well?”

“Well enough,” Caterina replied. She pawed at the wild tangle of her hair and padded into his half of the room like an envoy making a careful entreatment. “I dreamt that I was a pomegranate. Strange, you think?”

He snorted. She grinned, feeling victorious for having won the little puff of breath.

“Hm,” he said. “I don’t know. Perhaps you have the look.”

“Smarmy bastard,” Caterina drawled, lips still drawn in a rakish grin. She plodded to a spot at his side, scratching at her hip while she tried to steal a glance at the parchment spread across his desk. He tilted his shoulders sideways to hide it from her. “What is it? Let me see.”

“It’s nothing,” he countered coolly, but with enough of a self-conscious sharpness in his voice that she could do nothing but sink her teeth into her request.

“Come on, Key. Don’t be coy. Is it a love letter? You know I’m more a woman of action than words.”

“Hardly,” came Cichol’s dry reply. She laughed.

“A letter destined for a bottle, then? Trying to write for your rescue?”

“I know better than to bring any poor heroic soul to place like this,” he said. Caterina laughed again. She slung an arm around his shoulders in an effort to peek over his head, and was pleased to find that he didn’t immediately toss free from her like a wiggling sardine. Kalanka made everyone sweeter, as far as she was concerned, the blessed little ring of hell that it was.

“ _There once lived a great shark in the blue-green deeps_ ,” she read, and held fast against him as he finally stiffened and did his best to shake her off, “ _whom all the little fishes feared—_ ”

“That is enough.”

“Is this a _story_?” Caterina giggled, the sound as rare and girlish as it was honest. “I didn’t realize that you were an author, Key.”

“It is,” he grumbled, rolling the parchment back into its scroll as he did — _oh, stop_ , she laughed, knowing that the ink would smear, but he seemed committed to its untimely demise — and bucking his shoulder in her unrelenting grip, “more of a _fable_ , if you must know.”

“A fable.”

“Yes.”

She gave his arm a final squeeze before he swung it at her, her laughter echoing in the rafters as she danced away.

“A fable about what? I’ll just read it later if you don’t tell me now, you know. I’ve got very sticky fingers.” She waggled them at him. He scowled. “Pirate, you see.”

“It isn’t meant for you,” he answered indignantly.

“What? Why’s that? Don’t think that I need teaching?”

“You are a decidedly lost cause,” he sighed. She laughed once more. “I’ve written it for the children in the village.”

“The ones always tossing shells at you?”

“The very same,” he admitted thinly. “Pity the poor creatures to be tempered in such crude company. Clearly they require a good word that doesn’t invoke,” he paused, chewing over his words, “ _indecency_.”

“Ahh,” Caterina offered sagely, thumbing at her chin as she did. “I see. So this great shark of yours doesn’t suck any cock, is that it?”

“Caterina,” Cichol choked. 

“Good thing, all of those sharp teeth. You know, I’ve heard that sharks’ve got two—”

“Enough,” he sputtered. She raised both pointer fingers at him and bent them with a waggle of her brow. “Honestly. Who raised you?”

“Scoundrels,” she said with a wink. “Drunks and thieves. Come on then, my dear great-white.” She gripped at her skirts. He turned from her with an exasperated _Caterina!_ just as she drew her nightgown over her head. She fixed another grin on the back of his head and moved to hunt out her clothes. “Time to find our breakfast, hm?”

“Breakfast? It’s hardly dawn. Do you ever think of anything beyond your own satisfaction?”

“Of course not,” she told him. She paused for a moment to pull on her boots. “You know me well enough for that.”

“I suppose that’s true,” he sighed, defeated. She grinned and gave him a second wink when he turned to stand from his chair and failed at hiding a little smirk of his own.

* * *

It should be said that most captors knew better than to give their charges knives. Writing desks must’ve been rarely given as well, but then again, it wasn’t often that you heard of a captive slitting the throat of their abuser with a credenza. Caterina understood this, of course; but she was also hungry, and the tide would only be out for so long, and one woman could only shuck so many oysters. 

“You put it here,” she instructed Cichol, wedging the edge of her knife between the clamped jaws of the poor mollusk destined to become a briny meal, “and then twist.”

“I am aware,” he sniffed, and made good on it by cracking open his own oyster. Caterina made an impressed noise before darting forward to snatch it from him. She swallowed the slimy creature with a lip-smacking slurp. “What are you— _excuse me_.”

“Lessons fee,” Caterina answered with a shrug. She swung back her arm to lob the shell into the sleepy surf nibbling the shoreline a half-dozen paces away.

“Has anyone ever told you that you are a crook?”

“Oh, that’s the least interesting of the names I’ve earned,” she sang, darting forward to hunt out another oyster to eat. “ _Scallywag_ , I like that one. _Thief_ , of course.” She leveraged open a new bite, sucking the saltwater from her fingers afterwards as she tossed the split shell aside. “ _Flea-bitten harlot_ , that one’s colorful. Lots of things about my old, dried-out womb.”

“Goodness.”

“ _Cursed, wizened, soured_ , like it’s some sort of fermented plum. Makes me hungry every time,” she admitted with a grin. Cichol made a face at that. Of course he did.

“What company you keep,” he noted thinly, pausing halfway through the words to crouch and fish his next victim from the tidal pools.

“The worst,” Caterina agreed with a laugh. A rush of wind barreled against them suddenly, smelling like the sea from where it’d come. Cichol muttered with annoyance over his latest mouthful now interrupted by a wet strand of his hair.

“You should cut it if you won’t braid it,” Caterina observed, cocking a brow at him when she did. He scowled. “Unless you want a bellyful of hairballs, kitty.”

“I will not honor that with a response,” he tutted — which, naturally, _was_ a response, although Caterina still remembered his extended vow of silence well enough not to correct him on the matter. It was far more amusing to have a chatty shadow, she’d learned.

“Long hair is dangerous at sea,” she countered.

“And yet you wear it.”

“Not like that.” She nodded at the spill of green tangling around his shoulders. “I tie it back, hence the braids, eh? But you, with all of _that_ , you get too close to the lines and next thing you know I’ll have your head as a second flag up there with the sails.” Caterina waved her blade at the clouds to accentuate the warning. Cichol hummed.

“Duly noted.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, biting back the familiar urge to test him on his threadbare story about that theoretical boat he’d sunk to instead glance quickly at his temples.

“You don’t need to hide behind it,” she suggested breezily, casting her gaze back out to sea. He didn’t answer. She hadn’t expected a response. Instead she drew in a breath and slowed their wandering to sit on a slick stone. Cichol eyed her, unconvinced by her collegial slap of the greenish algae growing on her perch but relenting all the same, if only because they’d been bound together long enough for him to know that she wasn’t fond of hearing _no_.

“You know Piero,” she started once he’d sat. Cichol snorted.

“The man with whom we dine six days out of seven? Yes, I am acquainted with him.”

“I see the oysters have got your blood flowing,” Caterina laughed. “Most men would put it to better use, but who am I to judge?”

“Honestly,” Cichol groaned, rolling his eyes. “Must you _always_ —”

“Piero,” Caterina insisting, grinning for a half moment longer before her voice settled, “was a captain when I first found him — or a captain in everything but name. He very nearly outran me, clever sailor that he is. When I finally scuttled him and boarded his ship, the man who ruled him offered up his head in exchange for leniency. He obviously hadn’t dealt much with my type before,” she added, laughing, but this time in a way that was more rueful than before. “This man who wished to live if Piero died, he called himself _captain_ , too, although just by looking at him I knew the ship would’ve been long sunk with him at the helm. But brilliant Piero still bowed before his judgment. Do you know why?” Cichol frowned. Caterina didn’t let him answer; wanted the right to say the words herself.

“Because of his silver hair,” she continued. “Because of where he was born. He made that ship of theirs dance, and they treated him like a dog.”

“And now he serves you.”

Cichol’s contention punched the wind from her lungs. Sometimes she forgot that he was clever beneath all of his scowls and grumbles and flushing cheeks.

“Ha,” she managed thinly, looking away. “Yes. And now he serves me — and many others beside him, too. But I have paid them for it, you understand?”

“What was Piero’s price?”

Caterina ground the point her knife against the rock, scraping away green and grey into a frothy white with each turn of her wrist.

“The same as everyone’s. Blood and gold.”

“And if I want for neither,” Cichol asked, his voice as steady as the gentle rush of the surf, “for how long will you keep me collared?”

Caterina stared silently at the pools scattered across the bank. There were little fish caught inside them, swimming in desperate circles as the water warmed beneath the sun.

“Let’s go,” she answered finally, biting the words between the grit of her teeth. She stood and turned towards the bowing palms which circled the town at their backs. “I’ve had my fill.”

“Very well,” Cichol answered. He had no other choice.

* * *

“Is something the matter?” Piero asked her from across the stewed snapper of their dinner. Part of her wanted to ignore him. The bald kindness of his voice turned her stomach nearly as much as the richness of their meal; the flaky fish and knobs of potato all bobbing in coconut cream. It wasn’t that she missed dried mackerel but that she deserved it, rather, maybe, pinbones and all. 

“Hardly,” she managed with the stab of her fork. “Another day in paradise.”

“Hm,” said Piero. He took a sip of tea— always tea with him, on land and at sea, enough that she was surprised that it hadn’t stained his tongue —and glanced over at Cichol before matching her gaze once more. She hoped she was just as unreadable as their table mate, although she doubted it. Had never been much of a mummer, really. “Indeed.”

“ _Indeed_ ,” she echoed sourly, pushing some sort of rootish vegetable around her plate. “And you? Have you grown bored of our host?”

“Hardly,” Piero mimicked as well. So everyone was clever, was that the way that things were now? She crinkled her nose at him, but Piero endured it with his usual unruffled stare. “He has made himself quite the library in our time away. Just today I found a fascinating collection on the mainland’s western tribes. Barbarians, the author contends, although we are both familiar with the literary hand that perhaps favors that term too heavily.”

“Are we,” she answered dryly, but of course they were; if there was a people that the average critic found more savage than Duscur, it was Sreng. According to them it was a wonder that either she or Piero could even read. She took a long drag from the flagon at her elbow in an effort to prove them right. Nothing wrong with a bit of temporary illiteracy; crossed eyes, that sort of thing. And she was a goddamned _pirate_ , in any case, wasn’t that right? Not like she was supposed to behave. Not like she was bound to some set of golden rules protected by some... some pirate court, or some other nonsense. She snorted into her drink. That’s right. Fear the pirate magistrate— certainly they must have been quite the intimidating bureaucrat.

“Why don’t you make yourself a proper librarian, then,” she added. “You can keep Calosus’ books all happy and well-stroked.”

“I’ve never considered myself much of a caretaker,” Piero replied. Cichol joined in with a belabored sigh that made the fire in Caterina’s chest grow ever hotter.

“Never too late for new ventures,” she drawled. She sloshed a generous splash of ale down her arm with her next drink. “I think it’d suit you well.”

“Is that intended to be a suggestion?” The bare round of one of Piero’s brows rose with his question.

“Sure,” she spat, “a suggestion. Or an order, or whatever other sort of thing I’m meant to say, foul creature that I am. Whichever you’d prefer.”

“I’d prefer that you keep me apprised of whatever nonsense that has put you into a mood rather than drown me with it,” Piero tested, “as I am very rarely eager to find myself underwater. Or do you mean to tell me that you are dissatisfied with my work?”

“Dissatisfied—pah,” Caterina muttered, realizing that she’d guzzled herself halfway drunk in just the same moment that she noted she might have overstepped with her second-in-command. Piero was too stoic for these sorts of things, at least; wouldn’t splash his drink in her face like Naima did when Caterina bared her teeth, but would instead—insufferably—stand beside her until she told him what was really going on, and that was the last thing she needed, particularly with Cichol still scowling a chair away, all smug, as if he knew better. Bastard.

“Of course I’m not _dissatisfied_ ,” she relented finally, tossing herself backwards in her chair and sipping glumly at her ale. “Might as well just give the _Snake_ to you. She loves you enough for it.”

“I have no issue with the current arrangement,” Piero countered. He paused to take a neat bite from his plate before he continued. “And so I will consider this discussion closed.”

Caterina swallowed her latest gulp and prepared herself for a retort— of what, or why, she wasn’t yet certain, just that she needed to spit it out before the vitriol in her gut poisoned her —but was cut short by the sight of Naima making a sudden and rather noisy entrance at the front half of the tavern hall. 

“Caterina!” Naima shouted through the catcalls of the drunks flanking her. She danced between the tavern’s crowded tables, hard to lose even in the rabble thanks to her indigo silks. Caterina would have added her own hoots and yowls to the din if not for how grim she looked.

“Help us all,” Naima groaned once she’d made to their side, “but of course you’re _drunk_ , aren’t you?”

“Not entirely,” Caterina replied, shoving away her flagon for good measure. “What is it, darling?”

“There’s no time for poetry,” Naima snapped tartly. “They’ve come for us. I’ve seen them myself— boats in the harbor flying the rams’ head.”

“Shit,” Caterina said, the image of the navy banner with its silver horned ram shooting enough ice through her veins to make her sober again. She stood swiftly from her chair. Piero followed, looking no less affected by the news. “How close?”

“They’ve made it to the mouth of the bay,” Naima told her tightly.

“How many?”

“Too many of them. Ten if not twenty, and some large enough for guns.”

“And this is the first I’ve heard of it?” Caterina swept aside her chair with a clatter, her fingers finding the smooth grips of the pistols at her hips as she stormed towards the center of the room.

“They’ve taken advantage of the new moon,” Naima answered. “They’ve hung black sails.” Caterina growled in reply.

“The townspeople,” Piero offered brusquely, knocking Caterina free from her anger. She nodded.

“Yes. You and Naima both,” she said. “Lead them into the hills. Quickly, you understand?”

“What is this?” Cichol asked. His question went unanswered.

“I would rather stand with you,” Piero argued.

“No. You keep them safe, alright? This isn’t what they’ve bargained for, letting us pinch their women and drink their wine. You men!” Caterina then shouted, turning from the trio to face the room at large. “Men of mine!”

 _Yah!_ the room answered, well-trained to obedience when their captain spoke that way, all salt and steel. She made a count of them as they stood from their tables— a dozen, maybe twenty. Nothing, but perhaps enough. 

“Time once more for you to earn your keep. Arm yourselves and find your brothers. Move as a number, and leave no one behind. Send Kalanka to the hills— to Piero and Naima. Cause no mischief or it’ll be me you answer to, no island court, you understand?”

“Captain!”

“What is going _on_ ,” Cichol insisted tightly. She ignored him until he gripped her arm, winding his fingers tighter than she’d once imagined him capable of.

“Albinea,” Caterina told him. “They call themselves a navy, as if they have the right. Headhunters is what they are— hunting for people like me and for sport, not that it matters. I should have known that they’d come here, starved mongrels that they are. Naima,” she then added, working herself free from Cichol to grab the woman by the shoulders. “Run as quick as you can and find Calosus, won’t you? Hide him somewhere if he can’t run.”

“I will,” Naima promised, her lips pressed tight. “You should come with us, although I know you won’t. You’re not some damned infantryman, Caterina.”

“You always know how to flatter me,” Caterina laughed, bending forward to press her lips to Naima’s brow before she nudged her towards Piero. “Keep safe. Don’t be stupid. I need the both of you.”

“Captain,” Piero agreed.

Caterina nodded and turned on her heel.

“Where are we going,” Cichol gasped as Caterina and her men split from the rest of them to storm the forward door.

“To kill some Albineans,” she answered grimly. He grunted, no doubt dissatisfied by the answer.

“To the longhouses,” she clarified, pausing to push a gaggle of girls towards the hills behind them and then nodding at a pair from her own crew to join their own number. “Calosus doesn’t like swords in town. Makes sense, except for moments like these. Need to arm ourselves. Well, _you_ do, and the rest of them.” She fidgeted with her gunbelt, eyes ahead.

“ _I_ do,” he echoed tightly. “I am no soldier.”

“Better than a dead man. _Shit_ ,” she snarled, her pace faltering as they turned a corner to catch the first sight of the bay beyond. Naima hadn’t lied when she’d said there were too many new ships at harbor. The surf was cluttered with dinghies crawling from unfamiliar schooners like beetles swarming a corpse. They hadn’t made it to shore yet, but they would soon, and with no one there to stop them.

“Hurry,” she called to the men jogging with her, and pressed them all into a loping run.

“What do they want,” Cichol insisted next, his voice dipping and stretching from their newly harried pace.

“My head,” Caterina replied, “and they’ll carry it with them when they raze the town. Monsters. They’re all just monsters calling themselves different names. We shouldn’t have come here. I knew they were following us, but to risk war with _Brigid_...”

“Captain!”

They threaded their way through a set of crossroads to finally come upon the longhouses. Word had spread enough for a good portion of her crew to be waiting for her there. She nodded at them with the buck of her head, following after with a swing of her arm.

“We meet them at the shore. Make yourself cruel— swords and spears. I’ll give you ten gold for skulls and one hundred for commanders, you hear?”

“Yes, Captain!”

The growing crowd filled with a buzzing anticipation as they tossed blades between themselves and slipped on mismatched helmets and stolen mail. Caterina pushed Cichol through the crush to enter one of the longhouses.

“Can you use a weapon?”

“A _weapon_ ,” he answered her breathlessly. “What do you expect me to do?”

“Keep yourself alive. I can’t fight for the both of us.”

She watched his stance grow stiff at the suggestion and sighed. Her eyes darted to a collection of weapons quickly growing sparse. She nodded with her newest idea and dashed forward to snatch a lance before it was taken.

“Here,” she barked, shoving the weapon at him. “Swing this around. Yell as loud as you can and maybe no one will be stupid enough to run at you.”

“ _Swing_ it— Caterina, I’m not—”

“Take it!”

She lost the roar of her voice beneath the boom of something louder. Each muscle in her body suddenly drew tight, sensing what it was before her mind made sense of it. _Cannon shot_ , came a whisper in her ear; next a gasp as the wind was sucked from the room and from her lungs as well; and then the crackle of bones heated to breaking over a roaring fire. She heard her men begin to yell before they were cut short and then— nothing at all, or at least not sound. There was a weight, immeasurable on her chest; the taste of blood in her mouth. Blackness in her eyes and anger, anger so intense she nearly saw it, too, as white as a tempest’s churn.

“What,” she stuttered, feeling the word gather in her mouth, although she couldn’t yet hear anything beyond the bell ringing in her ears. “ _What_.”

She pressed against the weight on her chest and groaned when her body screamed back at her for it. It was horrible— enough so that she didn’t know what was broken or what was torn, just that it was, some part of her body, or perhaps all of it. A wave of self pity washed over her. It was nearly worse than the pain.

 _This isn’t what I wanted_ , she thought, desperate; _this wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough._

“—terina!”

Something shifted on top of her, enough so that she realized she’d been suffocating in those moments before. She sucked in a rasping breath and reeled from it, tears gathering in her eyes from the knife-points spreading between her ribs as her lungs gobbled the sooty air. The breath spooked vision back into her eyes, blurred and dim as it was— and not from her addled mind but from the fire that was now burning where a line of beds had once been.

“Caterina!”

 _Green eyes_ , she thought, still stunned stupid as she watched the man above her wrestle another fallen beam. Green, like his spilled blood now nearly black against his jaw. His hair hung ragged and tangled like seagrass pulled from the darkest depths of the sea. _Ridiculous_. He should have let her cut it.

“You,” she managed, wincing with the word.

“Yes,” Cichol insisted tightly. His lips were pinched in their usual scowl, but there was something new in his gaze. He was afraid; not of the fire but by what he’d found when he’d unburied her. She could read in his look what he would no doubt leave unsaid.

“So this is the end,” she breathed.

“Don’t speak,” he ordered. “And don’t move. I’ll get this...this mess off from your legs.”

Caterina tested her fingers and felt a small dash of hope blossom in her stomach as they twitched to life. Her wrists, too; forearms, and even the aching rounds of her shoulders. She shifted and pushed a hand through the gloom to seek out the soft edges of his collar.

“Don’t bother,” she rasped. “I can’t feel them. I’ve seen enough men fall from masts to know what this is.”

She groped along the front of his shirt. First she found his heartbeat, hammering fast and wild; next the tacky spill from where his split lip had dripped; then, finally, and nearly as hot as the fire, the smooth beads of the hexed chain strung around his neck. She closed her fingers around it and tugged as hard as she could manage. The string flexed and for a moment she feared that they would both be lost, but then with a crackling spark it finally snapped. The beads clattered and bounced apart.

“Listen to me,” she forced through her lips, as much as it was becoming an agony to speak. “Those Albineans, some of them, they pray to Agartha, you understand? Death will be a mercy if they find you here. Run.”

“And what about you?”

“I’ll die,” she answered, trying and failing to keep the pitiful waver from her voice. “But at least I’ll be close to the sea.”

“Caterina,” he challenged. It seemed as though even he didn’t know what else he could offer her.

“I’m sorry,” she admitted next, rolling one of the beads between her fingers in their limp fold across her chest. “I shouldn’t’ve kept you....But I liked it. Your company.”

“You shouldn’t speak,” he argued, which she supposed was true. With each breath she lost a little more of what she saw, replaced with that velvety nothingness again, and this time accompanied by cold. God, the cold. She hated the cold. But it always found her, didn’t it, even all the way down here?

“Run,” she echoed, flinching as she struggled to keep her eyes on him instead of rolling backwards where they were wanted. “Run, Key. _Run_.”

Now she was swimming in it — the cold — although the better word for it was sinking. She shivered, but she wasn’t certain if her body moved when she did. It wasn’t listening to her much anymore. At least he did, she thought last, her thoughts disintegrating in the haze; at least Cichol listened.

He ran.

* * *

She woke under the sun. It was bright enough to make her wince even after she’d been convinced that she could open her eyes. There were doves, too; she could hear them cooing. _Ridiculous_. She’d hardly thought that she’d go in _this_ direction when she died. Maybe the heavens were taunting her before they cast her into brimstone. _This is what you could have had if you hadn’t been such a crook_ , the goddesses would say. Would they listen if she told them that she preferred _scallywag_? 

“Ooh, ooh,” said the doves. “Ooh, my poor darling.”

Caterina scowled. Well, now, _that_ wasn’t what she wanted. She’d had enough pity for one lifetime, as ill-intentioned as it may have been. No point in starting her second with another healthy serving.

“Not... so poor,” she countered, her mind reeling from the effort of turning breath to noise.

“Caterina!”

The doves kissed her with human lips. They smelled suspiciously like Naima’s salves; all mint and eucalyptus and bitter herbs. Caterina sucked in the scent of it and would have cried if she hadn’t been so committed to setting a good first impression with whatever gods who’d found her.

“Oh, Caterina, you’re awake,” the doves insisted, sounding as sweet as— well, no. Sounding _exactly_ like Naima, in fact. Caterina willed herself to open an eye and, albeit far later than she’d hoped, both of them opened under the command. Naima was there staring back at her, but in a state that crashed all of her hopes that they’d found their way to some heaven when they’d died.

“Naima,” she stuttered, her voice rough and unfamiliar. “What...are you?”

“A fool,” Naima answered, her voice cracking with relief. “I’m a fool, but in good company.”

“Your...” Caterina started, but found it difficult to finish: _your eye_ , she could say, bandaged as it was, the golden glitter of it lost behind linen bandages grown damp and dark; _your face_ perhaps was better, because what was a beautiful face when half of it was shrouded like that? Naima winced when Caterina reached forward, fingers trembling and half-numb as they brushed gingerly against the dressing wrapped around the woman’s brow and then looped tightly at a diagonal across the leftward half of her head.

“Will you cast me away?” Naima’s question was teasing, but she still choked around the words. Caterina brushed clumsily at the wet glitter filling her lashes.

“Never,” Caterina promised, strangled. “Who did this to you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ve lived, and so have you.”

Naima’s reassurance made Caterina shiver. It wasn’t right— wasn’t _possible_. No one knew what it was to die until they were dying, and Caterina was certain that she’d known it well. The thought, bewildering as it was, was suddenly brushed away by the thunderclap of another far more desperate realization.

“Piero,” she gasped. “The men. Calosus.”

“Shh,” Naima soothed, brushing her trembling fingers across Caterina’s brow. “Piero lives, Tomcat. No doubt he’ll do it for far longer than the rest of us. Calosus too. He proved himself an able warrior.” She smiled limply. “Armed with nothing but an oar. You should have seen him. I was certain he’d row us all to hell.”

“And the men?”

Naima’s smile withered.

“Some have fallen,” she admitted. She made to glance away, but tensed as she recognized Caterina’s flinching effort to rise from her bed. “Rest, Caterina. You must.”

“The ship,” Caterina insisted, barely managing to push the words through her knotted throat. She was dizzy and foggy-limbed but Naima’s strength wasn’t brute, and so the Almyran had no hope of holding her down when she pushed against her more earnestly. Caterina staggered to her feet. It shouldn’t have been possible. Naima was a physician, not a witch, and even then not one of the best; so how had she unbroken Caterina’s spine with salves and sour tinctures?

“Caterina, please.”

Not that it mattered. Not that any question mattered other than _where is my ship_ ; and not just a ship but her life, her blood, her bones. How many men had she killed to take it? How many more had died to keep it in her hands? She tossed herself at the door— and realized as she did that she wasn’t in her apartments but in a longhouse, and it missing half its roof, which was better than the rest of them, all cinders and broken beams, and there in ruin beside it the place where she had died— and found herself nearly blind in the bright sun outside. Her feet sunk into the sand but she forced them forward, her fingers clawed and gripping at the air as she struggled to keep herself upright. Her mind swam from the effort, blinking between vision and sparkling stars, but she’d suffered enough storms to find her footing now.

“No,” she spat defiantly, and at everything: at the smell of fire in the air and the blood staining the sand, at the whispers and gasped _captains!_ that followed her staggering path; at the beauty of the sky above them, blue and unmoved by the ruin below; at what she already knew without confirming it, not until she shoved her way through a bewildered group of men wearing splints and blackened eyes to find the beach and the bay beyond.

“Caterina!” Naima called in her wake, limping like a newborn fawn just as Caterina had in the short journey from the longhouses to the shore. Caterina didn’t hear her, nor the bestial groan that ripped itself from her lungs as her knees sunk into the sand.

“ _No_ ,” she insisted, but the gods didn’t listen to her, much in the same way that they hadn’t let her die. This, an empty bay and a crowded beach, was worse. There was wreckage everywhere: coiled lines and snaggletoothed timber and sailcloth and bodies, pale-lipped and stiff-limbed, arranged in endless, tidy lines. When she’d last been alive there must have been nearly thirty ships crowding the sea, and hers the grandest of all of them, but the sea had swallowed them. Caterina gaped at the placid shimmer of the waves made blurry by her tears as she recognized the spines of sunken masts peeking above the surf. It was impossible to speak the names of all of the ships that had been lost, but she knew— could feel, even, as if she’d drowned in its place—that the _Sea Snake_ was among them.

It was a grave; hers, but desecrated by the corpses of her hunters and her friends, and all of it buried in a casket built from her broken ambition. _Ambition_. No. Not just ambition, but more. It was the wind and the rain, the drunken songs they’d sung her; it was bounty. Freedom, and not just hers, and all of it now scattered across the beach like jetsam and swallowed up by the deep.

Her body filled with pinpricks. She felt the sun on her skin, but storm clouds had gathered in her eyes. It was better, maybe, that they had. Surely she would have thrown herself into the waves if she could have forced herself further forward— finished what the gods had started before they’d found a better punishment in keeping her alive. Instead her head nodded backwards as she swooned.

Caterina braced for the baked heat of the sand but felt the slick of a body instead. It was warm at its core but cool to the touch, and somehow she knew it was because of the water beaded fresh from the surf on the figure’s skin. A pair of arms slipped beneath her knees and around her shoulders. She sucked in a dizzy breath and tasted salt on her tongue. Her nostrils filled with the clean brine of fresh fish flesh and shucked oysters. They were moving, lurching over the dunes. She could hear the figure’s— a man’s, his breast flat and solid against her cheek —thudding steps and the drone of his voice, gibberish as it was to her ear. More water dripped from his hair and spattered across her brow.

 _The sea_ , she thought, her lashes fluttering as she struggled to keep awake. What a fool she’d been to think that she could own it.


	4. Kindling, Burning

Sometimes, when she let her mind wander, Caterina daydreamed about her mother. Nothing in the stories her father had told her had convinced her that the woman had been particularly kind, of course, or the sort to be doting, or generous, or sweet. Neither had these been the traits of the man who’d sired her. Her father’s greatest act of love had come in the way he’d spun tales about her mother when Caterina had still been a babe; that long-dead Galina had been a siren returned to the sea, and that when they sailed at night they could listen to the surf and hear her singing.

Caterina had grown out of these stories young. Her father had told her the truth, then, but only because she’d asked him for it. It’d been a cruel business, he’d told her. Galina had been too frail to carry a child. At nine years old Caterina had balanced what was better for her: to believe in her father’s lies about sea maidens, or to be burdened by the fact that she’d killed her mother when she’d come into the world. She’d chosen the latter, of course, and paired it with a healthy serving of self-loathing that she tempered with bitter humor as she grew older.

The daughter of a whore, she’d gladly label herself when others tried to make it a weakness; and it wasn’t, of course. She didn’t care about the whoring. What kept her awake at night were the other things that her father had told her. Galina was young, and illiterate, and prone to swearing, he’d said. She fought with the other brothel girls and with her clients even more often. She’d tolerated Caterina’s father because he always paid her well and bought her meals, and because he boasted that one day he’d make himself into a captain, and because a ship was like a stairway to heaven for a Srengish whore.

But maybe it would’ve been different, Caterina sometimes wondered when she found herself feeling low; maybe if Galina hadn’t bled to death in her bed, maybe things would’ve changed. Bogdan, her father, did become a captain, after all. He’d taken Caterina to sea, and no matter that her mother’s brothel would’ve preferred to keep her in exchange for the girl they’d lost, so why not take her mother away as well? It would’ve made Galina happy. Maybe motherhood would’ve made her happy, too. Maybe her pretty face and dirty mouth would’ve melted the ice in Bogdan’s chest. Maybe they would’ve come to like each other; would’ve become fond, even. Maybe Galina would’ve loved her daughter, and not how her father did, but in the way of mothers: with forehead kisses and a conspiratorial femininity that had always been so foreign to Caterina. She would’ve liked it, Caterina had long ago decided. Love, but unconditional, and unabashed.

“I’m sorry,” said Naima’s voice, lost somewhere beyond the black of Caterina’s shuttered eyelids. “I tried to stop her.”

“It’s alright,” came a man’s sighing reply. “I’m not surprised.”

Huffed laughter. Naima’s; a little sad. Caterina shivered when she felt the woman’s cool fingers brush her brow.

“Oh, Tomcat.”

The room lulled into silence. Caterina began to drift backwards into sleep again, but was startled awake with the sudden kindling of something warm and pleasant in her chest. She heard Naima gasp.

“How do you do it?” Naima asked.

“It’s difficult to explain,” the man — Cichol, of course, who else? — replied. “But I could teach you, if you’d like.”

“Really? _Magic?_ ”

“It’s not so different from what you do,” he reassured her. Caterina’s brows twitched as she felt something straighten into a more comfortable line in her spine. “All you need is a slightly different approach. We’ll discuss it when you’re more rested.” He paused. “You look exhausted.”

Naima sighed. Her fingers traced one of the scars running above Caterina’s temple.

“How can I sleep? She gave me everything, you know. I was a wretch and she took me in, without even asking what I could offer her. She’s a terrible captain,” Naima admitted, laughing below her breath. “The best of them would have never run to the shore like she did. They would have sold Calosus and the rest of Kalanka to Albinea, and for a profit. A tidy one. And here is her reward.”

“Hm,” said Cichol.

Caterina’s eyes were watering. She wanted nothing more than to force them open so that she could defend herself, or explain away her tears, or chastise Naima for calling herself a wretch and Caterina a fool, but the weight of her exhaustion was far too much to overcome. She felt herself bowing backwards into sleep again instead. 

“You know it,” Naima continued. “You’ve seen it yourself, you know it’s true. We’re nothing but thieves, I know that well enough. There’s some hell waiting for all of us for what we’ve done. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t...That’s why you did it, right?”

 _Did what_ , Caterina wondered, and would have asked, but downwards she dipped into darkness again; this time gentle, and with her feeling frustrated but at least unafraid.

* * *

_Scritch scritch scratch._

“Gods,” Caterina groaned. She felt drunk and sober and hungover. It made her want to retch, although her stomach was empty enough to convince her that she’d have nothing but dust to cough up. She turned sideways into her pillow, sinking her teeth into the cotton to stop herself from spitting out the pitiful string of words tangling in her throat as she came to remember just why it was she felt so miserable and strung out.

The scribbling pen stilled from across the room. It was dark. She sunk into the mattress and listened to the scrape of a chair against the floorboards. She could smell the approach of an oil lamp before she saw it; listened to the clatter of its dish as it was lifted from the desk and then repositioned at the little table at her bedside. So she was in her apartments again, it seemed, and him as well.

“What are you doing here?” she asked him, her voice swallowed up by the pillow’s down. Cichol took his time in repositioning his chair at her bedside.

“I see that you are feeling better,” he answered. Caterina turned to her side, her lips tightened into a scowl made only deeper by her sudden tears.

“You should have let me die,” she snapped. He flinched and looked away. It wasn’t what she had expected— made him look suddenly small and younger than he was. _Stop_ , that look of his told her, but she was already tumbling far too fast for that. “I gave you what you wanted. You should have run.”

“Maybe,” he admitted quietly. Caterina propped herself up on an unsteady elbow. Cichol made a move to catch her, but was cut short by the wave and drag of her hand across her teary eyes.

“ _Don’t_ ,” she rasped. “Don’t bother. Just — just tell me about this life you’ve given me. The _Snake_ is sunk,” she said, too stern to be a question, “and the men...How many of them? How many of them are dead?”

“Caterina,” Cichol countered. She bared her teeth at him in a snarl.

“Don’t pity me, you bastard. Tell me who I’ve killed. How many of them?”

“...Forty-seven,” he said. “And thirteen from the town.”

“Forty-seven,” she echoed tightly. She’d managed a crew of one-hundred ten— men and women she knew, people she’d picked herself, and dined with, and slept swinging side-by-side. Forty-seven, and for nothing in return, and with thirteen innocents alongside them. “You should have left me to burn.”

“What justice would that have brought?” He was more bitter-voiced than she’d expected. “Forty-eight for the pyre, Caterina, and the world would not have been better for it. The Albineans were as you described them. They were hunting for sport.” His lip curled with disgust. “It was not your doing.”

“I drew them here,” she argued. She wrestled with her sheets, suddenly desperate to rise to her feet and hunt out the men she’d lost. “We should have never come. Take me to my people— show me!”

Cichol lurched from his seat to grab her by the arms. His grip was far tighter than she’d bargained. She wrestled against it, but her lagging strength was nothing compared to his unfettered one. Unmoved by her growling protest, he pushed her firmly backwards into the bed.

“Enough. Sit back.”

“Let me see them!” Panic sparked alive in her chest and quickly worked its way into her throat. She thrashed against Cichol’s hold, teeth grinding as she fought the lightheadedness dragging at her with each struggled yank of her arms. “Every one of them! I won’t let you burn them before I’ve seen them all!” 

“Listen to me, damn you!” Cichol shouted. She hunched against the sudden roar of his voice. “I cannot raise you from the dead!”

“You have, damn you! You’ve already drug me back!”

“I’ve done no such thing,” he growled. “You are alive, flesh and bone, and despite everything they did to you, but if you do not rest it will have all been for nothing. Kalanka wishes to build the pyres tomorrow, with the dawn. Nothing will be done tonight. I’ll bring you to them, but only if you sleep. Do you understand?”

Caterina bit into the flesh of her lower lip and fought the urge to spite him. But he was right; it would be for nothing. She was too lightheaded to fight him, and even if she weren’t, there was something in the vice grip of his fingers that coached her to be smarter than to swing a fist at him.

“I understand,” she relented, sinking backwards into the bed. Her lashes fluttered. _Dammit_ , she begged them silently, and them suddenly a thousand pounds; _keep up._

“Good,” Cichol said. He sounded winded with relief. “That’s all I ask.” He smoothed the sheets over her shoulders and turned to lower the wick burning at her bedside.

“The Albineans,” Caterina murmured when he stood. He looked backwards over his shoulder at her, his eyes dark in the gloom. His hair melted into it too, making it difficult to find where he ended and where the midnight shadows began. “Where have they gone?”

“To the deep,” he answered. She heard the crash of waves in what he said.

* * *

Cichol kept his word. She woke with the first light of the sun and found him waiting for her with a clean bundle of clothes and a pitcher of water. He turned his back to her and let her dress, shoulders stiff as he listened for her stumbling, and afterwards helped her take a drink before he pointed her towards the door. She rejected his offer to walk arm in supportive arm, but at least he had the decency not to insist on it. 

It was another beautiful morning. Gulls giggled and prattled above their heads as they made a slow approach towards the shore. It still smelled like the smoke of everything the Albineans had burned — the tavern, Caterina saw, as well as the smithy and a suite of thatch-roofed homes in addition to most of the longhouses — but there was the salt of the sea in the air, too, and the sugar of the hibiscus blooming prettily even in the ashes.

They were watched as they walked. Caterina was used to some versions of staring, but not like this. A murmur gathered at their heels, matched with peeking eyes and bowed heads and outstretched arms. Cichol looked no more comfortable with the display than she did. The tight press of his lips somehow reassured her.

Naima and Piero met them at the dunes. This time Caterina wasn’t ashamed of her tears when she threw her arms around Piero’s chest. Her first-mate drew her against him just as tightly, rubbing circles into her shoulders that kept a careful distance from her spine. _Now you’re the most handsome of all of us_ , she almost joked, or maybe something about how he’d nearly found himself a captain by way of elimination, but the words all died on her tongue. They seemed to understand. The four of them continued on with a nod to join what remained of her crew, bandaged and bruised, in building a long line of pyres along the tide.

It was hard work. First they downed the palms growing along the dunes and split them into kindling. The broadest-shouldered of them then handed the pieces hand-over-hand down the long shoreline, sweating from the pull of the sand at their feet and the growing glow of the sun above them. Priests from Kalanka’s humble temple directed the art of puzzling the pieces into neat squares along the beach, while the beauties from the pillow houses carefully tidied the sailcloth shrouding the dead waiting in the shade to be burned.

Caterina flitted between the groups, swinging axes and hauling heavy rounds of timber until Naima caught her tumbling woozily down one of the dunes. No matter how colorful her protest, Naima ignored it, instead locking her arms around Caterina’s shoulders as she shoved her towards a shadowed spot beneath one of the trees not yet felled.

“I want to help,” Caterina sputtered after she’d sucked down a mouthful of sun-warmed water. “You can’t stop me.”

“I could do anything I wanted to you right now,” Naima countered dryly. She sat beside Caterina cross-legged and brushed the sand from her trousers. “You’re as weak as a babe. What do you think they’ll do if they have to burn you, too?”

Caterina gritted her teeth and looked away. Her gaze settled on Piero. As usual, he looked otherworldly in his work of building a nearby pyre, like some sort of titan come to the earth out of misplaced benevolence. A wash of relief made her breathless as she considered how lucky it’d been that he hadn’t been hurt, and how hopeless she would’ve felt if he had been. No matter how much she’d survived, battered and scarred as she was, she’d never been disillusioned enough to think that she was invincible. She was still smaller than most men she killed, after all; there was a reason why she’d spent a king’s riches on her pistols. Piero was the strength she’d always wanted made manifest, just as the _Snake_ had been her freedom. And Naima...

Caterina sucked a breath through her teeth and turned to look at her.

“Does it hurt?”

Naima flinched slightly at Caterina’s question, surprised. Her fingers fluttered over her bandaged face. The linens had been changed; were no longer dark nor damp.

“No,” Naima said. “Not anymore. Cichol tended to it.”

Her voice was quiet, trembling. Caterina realized that her dressings weren’t meant to mend, but rather to hide behind. She frowned and reached out for her, suddenly desperate to press her to her breast and to whisper useless sweet nothings to try to calm her. Naima cringed away from her touch, pulling her knees to her chest to build a cage between them.

Piero her strength and her ship her freedom, and Naima her capricious tenderness— and how much of it had Caterina lost in a single forgotten afternoon? She blinked the heat from her eyes and looked to the shore again, this time settling on the sight of Cichol as he helped a handful of boys fit more beams into four corners. He’d finally bound back his hair, she noted with dampened amusement, although the long tail still looked ratty and windblown. Neither was there anything regal in his clothes, borrowed things too short in the leg and dirtied over the right shoulder, and yet an air of reverence followed him with every step. Caterina watched as even Calosus spoke to him with a bowed head, and how a queue of quiet crewmen seemed to follow in his wake without doing much else at all.

“He tended to the others as well?” Caterina asked, her gaze still fixed steady on him.

“Yes. Day and night, and starting with the worst of them. The townspeople, too.”

Caterina huffed and shook her head.

“What is it?” Naima asked, always well-tuned to Caterina’s fidgeting.

“With each moment I realize I have less of what I’ve once owned,” Caterina admitted. “After we give reparations for the dead and for the damage done here, and with the _Snake_...I’ll have nothing left, Naima. Not even enough to pay you for what you’re due. What will he ask for, hm? What will be his cost? He’ll own me for it, just like I...” A hot, frustrated breath choked the rest of her words into silence.

“Caterina,” Naima replied tightly. “What he’s done...It wasn’t for that.”

“What he’s done,” Caterina spat. “I see proof of it everywhere, and yet no one is willing to tell me what it was. And you mean to say that it was out of some sort of _charity_?”

“The men,” Naima told her, each word slow enough to show that she was being honest, “say that he is a god.”

“A god,” Caterina scoffed. She ground a fistful of sand between her palms. “You and I, we’ve known what he is since the moment we found him. Did the Albineans take your memory, too?”

“No,” Naima answered with a glare that Caterina most certainly deserved. “I was the one to treat him, you think I don’t remember? And I remember what you said, Tomcat. You saw it then, and now I’ve seen it, too. The ship we took — that brig, the spice runner — it was the last theft Albinea was willing to temper. They sent everything. The admiral sailed them with, I saw his banner. Twenty-three ships, some of them mean. Cichol sunk all of them.”

Caterina shivered and watched as Cichol stepped backwards from a fresh-built pyre, hands on his hips while he eyed it with a satisfied nod. Even as he was now, she could see him as how he must have been; silver-skinned and with a fanged barracuda’s maw stretched to an impossible scale. A monster of the sort she’d always been chasing when she sailed, and in that brazen way that one did when they were convinced they’d never find it.

“We’ve seen the world, my darling,” Caterina sighed. “Every ugly part. Do you know what it’s taught me? There are no gods, only masters. The sort who crown themselves. A man who christens himself by drowning men isn’t a creature of mercy. He doesn’t come without a cost.”

Naima huffed and stood. Her face was dark and troubled, but she still offered Caterina a hand.

“Well, whatever he is, Calosus has asked him to pray at the pyres. If you’re smart you’ll pray along with him. Today is about the dead.”

Caterina wanted to fight the suggestion, just like she wanted to fight most everything else. Instead she leaned forward and eased herself to her feet with a grip against Naima’s own, and together they walked forward to begin the work of burning her men.

* * *

By nightfall the pyres had dimmed to embers. Kalanka was the first to retreat from the glowing display. The crew followed after, already half drunk and hungry for the second portion to be poured in the ruins of where the tavern had once stood. Caterina lingered longer than the rest of them, of course. Naima wished her goodnight with a kiss on her cheek made strangely chaste after everything they’d shared. Piero came next, although he offered his usual resistance to the idea of leaving her alone. Perhaps the only reason that she was able to shoo him was because she wasn’t, really, but rather haunted by her green ghost again, and no matter that his hex had been long lost. 

“I’m tired,” Caterina told Cichol once they found themselves alone. She didn’t wait for an answer; stood instead and lurched across the soft slide of the sand towards the town. It looked better in the dark. The cool of the night air against her fire-warmed cheeks was another relief. She savored both of them as she staggered along the path that would return her to her quarters. No matter how far she walked, however, she could still smell the pyres. The worst of all of it was the fact that she didn’t mourn the men now burned to coal nearly as much as she mourned the ship broken at the bottom of the bay. Did that make her a monster, too?

Cichol followed her into the town and up the hills and through the respite of the sweet jasmine growing outside her apartments. They passed through the door much in the same way they had a hundred times before, although none in the past had found her so dizzy-eyed nor him as solemn. Now that the beach was behind them she felt the full brunt of the night’s chill. It was colder than it should have been, even if the season had started to turn. She hated it, just like she always did.

The bed creaked when she sat at its feet, her fingers clumsy as she worked the laces of her boots loose. She nearly slipped beneath the sheets in her clothes, but the idea of waking to the smell of the bonfire trapped in the cloth nauseated her enough to reconsider. She stripped off her shirt and then her slacks and balled them both on the floor, noticing but not commenting on how Cichol turned to give her privacy once more.

It was a good time to ask him what he wanted — as good as any other, that is, as if the whole situation wasn’t so unbelievably absurd in all of its many parts — them in this familiar, quiet place. If he meant to threaten to swallow her up like he had the Albineans, at least she wouldn’t have an audience when she admitted that she couldn’t afford whatever price he’d demand. Not that any of that was honorable, but at least it let her keep her pride. Damn it, she wanted to keep _something_ , at least.

But she was tired. It was cold. Even stripped she could still smell the grease of her cooked crew from the clothes on the floor. And she’d never known her mother — had never had a place to hide, soothing hands, placating words. Wasn’t that unfair? Wasn’t there something, some small part of all of the terrible things she’d done, _something_ that’d been unearned?

“Key,” she croaked. She heard him pause from his work of building his pile of cushions into a half-respectable bed. _A_ _god_ , Naima had said, but here he was, delivering rites in one afternoon and sleeping on the floor in the night that came after. What a racket. All of it.

“I won’t take anything,” she said. “I won’t be cruel. Just...Just lay with me for a while, won’t you?”

She heard the floorboards creak beneath his feet as he considered her request. It made her feel pitifully small. _Forget_ _it_ , she was ready to snap, but then he strode forward. She watched as he eyed her discarded clothes, no doubt realizing why she’d undressed, and with a sharp inhale pulled at the hem of his shirt as well. Borrowing from his lessons, she turned on her side and looked away. The bed groaned when he sat. Caterina dipped along with the mattress as he swung his legs over the side and settled himself into a stiff line.

It was strange to consider a bedfellow that she didn’t mean to simply satisfy. She lingered for a moment, staring into the blank dark of the far wall and listening to his stilted breath. Was he nervous? That seemed unfair. It also didn’t seem very divine.

The thought spurred her to turn again. She made a deliberate effort to keep the sheets tucked against her breasts, ridiculous as she found the task. Cichol was laid flat on his back, his hands folded neatly on his chest as if he were the next to be burned. It didn’t strike her that he made a habit of sharing beds.

Still, it was enough. She could feel his body already warming the sheets. Carefully, she nudged herself a little closer, listening for his rebuttal with every move. Finding none, she eased herself into a crescent shape at his side, just close enough that the tip of her nose brushed against his shoulder. His skin smelled like the sea: clean, tangy, fresh. She couldn’t smell the fire in him at all. Her eyes watered with relief.

_Thank god._

Maybe there was something funny in it, a phrase like that. She wasn’t entirely certain. Her mind had already begun to smear and blur with sleep. _Goodnight_ , maybe he said, although she didn’t hear it. She thought instead of how she’d always been the type to take what she wanted, and how at least this time it hadn’t been a theft that’d been unkind.

* * *

  
She woke rested and hungry. Already the sun had crept over the writing desk and along the floor, flowing into the white of the sheets and making them glow. It was what had woke her, likely, but the sight of her new bedfellow kept her awake. Cichol’s stiff pose had melted in his sleep. At some point he’d turned, tangling himself in his hair when he did, and now he was close enough for her to feel the puff of his breath on her face. One of his hands had roamed in his sleep, far more bold than its master, and was resting on her hip. He looked young: his cheeks slightly pink from the heat they’d trapped beneath the sheets, the perpetual furrow of his brow finally slackened and unbothered. There was a black smudge on his chin, no doubt from his work of stoking the fires the night before. It should have stirred her guilt awake. Instead it simply left her feeling charmed. 

Her eyes wandered. His hair had tumbled enough to uncover the long, fluted shape of one of his ears. It was the first time she’d seen them since she’d fished him from the sea. Maybe the sight should have summoned her anxiety as well, but in that moment she was only intrigued. It was like thumbing through the pages of a fairytale, she decided; and how strange it was that she’d come to know him as well as she had without knowing much of anything at all.

His nose crinkled. He grumbled a wordless phrase, crumpling his brows. She tried her best to keep her lips in an innocent line as she watched him wake, no doubt from feeling the weight of her gaze, and likely ready to run from it. That made her feel a little guilty, and twice-over once she watched his cheeks take on a darker flush. _Go on, then_ , she willed herself, but before she’d had the chance to pull away she saw his eyes — and how strange they were, really, now that she was close enough to study them. Green, of course, but with flecks of blues and golds like the freckles of something mined from deep inside the earth. His pupils were just as dark as hers but made from the wrong shape; sharp where hers were rounded, and skinny, slightly serpentine. How was it that she’d never noticed?

Cichol looked back at her with the same amount of wonder. It should’ve made her laugh. Ridiculous, really; she was just a woman, and certainly not the finest. Instead she fixated on the heat of his hand still steady on her hip. She thought about the morning they’d spent hunting for oysters; soft flesh, white teeth. The memory emboldened her to untangle one of her arms from between them. She moved slowly, like a swimmer dancing with a shark. His eerie eyes followed her hand as it rose and then inched forward to trace the shape of his lips with a fingertip.

His grip tightened around her hip. She could feel the press of his palm seeking out her body’s swell. _Not afraid_ , she divined from his touch; or at least not as he’d been during their disastrous visit to the brothel. She skimmed the bow of his lips from corner to corner and then along the centerline. They parted and sent an electric shiver down her spine — the spine he’d mended, she wondered silently, dragging her fingertip along the flat edge of his front teeth. Even now she could feel the molten touch of his white magic spilling between each vertebrae. It made her eyelids feel heavy; muddled the less important parts of her thoughts, things like _think this through_ and _stop_. She stroked her finger along the sharp edge of his too-long canine and shuddered when she felt his jaw tense tight, trapping her.

“It’s strange,” she breathed, “after everything, that you didn’t kill me.”

Cichol winced. She readied herself for disappointment — that she’d gone too far. Instead his hand slid upwards from her hip, pushing her closer to meet him when he dipped his head to kiss her. It was clumsy, all teeth and noses fitted into the wrong angles. A different breed of herself would have teased him for it, but she’d listened to him pray for her men, and watched him tip the torches to burn them. Now she felt herself burning, too.

She pressed herself against him, tugging him into the right position with a fistful of his hair to show him the better way of kissing her. A low noise rumbled in his chest. She chased after it, sliding her tongue against his and savoring his briny taste. Something deep inside her throbbed at the touch of him hard against her thigh.

“Do you want it?” she gasped, pulling away to catch her breath. He watched her with a flushed, half-lidded daze as she split her knees around his hips to arch the rest of her body above him, not touching but close enough to feel the heat of what they’d already done to one another. The way he’d kissed her had made her ready for conquest, but just now she’d felt a tremble in his touch as well. “Cast me off and I’ll go.”

“No,” he said, his voice thick. “Please. I want you.”

She kissed him; sunk her teeth into his lip until he gasped and chased the bend of his back with the grind of the slickness between her thighs. It was better that she didn’t answer him. _Wanting_ , hell, she always wanted everything. Promising him something like that wasn’t generous, wasn’t kind. Of course she wanted him — and now more than she had before, listening with drunken delight to the breathless noises he made when she guided him inside her. It was just that there was something hidden deeper inside of the pleasure she felt; a shadow, a second-skin, an other. What was it?

 _He’s handsome_ , the irreverent parts of her insisted; _nice cock, pretty face._ That was true. She’d always liked pretty things. But when his hands slipped over her thighs and begged her closer, deeper, she knew that it was a lie. Chintz. Shellac. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t how he fucked her, clumsy and earnest, not even after he’d rallied the nerve to tempt her onto her back; it was the reverence of his touch across the ragged edges of her scars, the way he gasped her name as if it had a second meaning. It was because he could have killed her for forty-three long days and instead he’d healed her, vertebrae by vertebrae. Not because he was a god, but maybe because he was a monster.


	5. Red Skies at Night

“Did I hurt you?”

It was a strange question. Caterina didn’t really understand what it meant at first. She was too preoccupied with drowsing, her mind fuzzy and fluffed now that she’d shouted out the tension that’d been coiled like a serpent in her gut. Cichol hummed impatiently beside her on the bed and so she reluctantly coaxed her eyes open, stretching as she did, and groaning new sounds of satisfaction with each bend of her limbs.

“What?”

“Did I— earlier — are you alright?”

Earlier. _Earlier_ was an interesting word. Three days earlier she’d broken her back and had nearly crumbled to cinders. So no, not _alright_ , but then again, _yes_ ; now she felt quite comfortable, and certainly not burned beyond the new freckles on her arms from working on the beachhead. _Earlier_ also meant this very morning as well as the afternoon that’d come after, when she’d roused Cichol again by stroking him until he woke with a moan and fucked her flat into the mattress. Maybe he meant _that_ , but then again he was speaking with far too much gravity to mean _did I bruise you_ , which he hadn’t, but not like she wasn’t interested in letting him try.

“Do you make a habit out of hurting the women you sleep with?” Caterina drawled, turning to face him. His cheeks flamed red. It made the rest of him look even more green. What a silly creature he was, really, when he wasn’t busy looking haughty.

“ _What_? No, of course not,” he sputtered, “it — it’s only that I was under the impression that — never mind.”

He appeared to be mustering all of his self control not to rocket backwards off the bed. She rewarded his courage by stroking his rough-bristled jaw, her eyes crinkling from her smile as she watched his own lips pucker into one of their many frustrated shapes.

“Darling,” she tested, not good enough to keep the amusement from her voice, “if you expected me to bleed onto the bedsheets, you’ve obviously not been paying much attention to my reputation.”

“That isn’t — I was only,” he tried. She slid forward to drape herself across his chest; to soothe his nerves or rile them, she hadn’t yet decided. Both options seemed intriguing. They were paired with a suspicion that she’d been chewing over since she’d first felt his trembling fingers skim over her skin.

“Key,” she started, and to the furrow of his brow, as if he could sense the threat lingering in her looming question, “have you been with a woman before?”

“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” Cichol gritted out. He tensed beneath her. Caterina pressed a kiss against his throat.

“It’s not terribly relevant,” she admitted, lips brushing against his quickened pulse. “Curiosity, mostly. What about a man?”

“No, I have not laid with a _man_ ,” he puffed into her hair. She laughed, careful to keep the sound as light and airy as she could manage.

“Pity. I rather like it, although I’ll admit that it’s not my usual fare. How did you manage it?”

“Excuse me?”

Caterina pulled backwards to trap his face between her hands. He looked back at her with flustered bewilderment made only more endearing by the absolute mess of his hair.

“You’re handsome,” she observed, tilting his jaw in a careful inspection. “Healthy. Have all of your teeth. Certainly you have an aptitude for it — or at least the proper motivation.”

“Caterina.”

“And you’re not _so_ young, now are you? So how did you avoid it?”

“What exactly is it that you want me to tell you?”

“Something about yourself,” Caterina said. It came out more earnest than she’d intended. His lips flickered into an indecisive shape. “You’ve seen most of my hand, haven’t you? To be honest with you, I don’t have so many secrets left. But you...” She rose her brows to punctuate her point. Cichol glanced away.

“This... That sort of thing, it wasn’t...encouraged,” he managed finally, each word dripping with sheepish self-consciousness, “in the place where I was born.”

“Zanado?”

Cichol flinched at the word and made a more honest effort at squirming away. Caterina held him fast.

“Where did you hear that?”

“I’m a sailor, not a fool,” she countered. “I’ve been known to read a book or two.”

“Let me be quick to assure you, then, that whatever you’ve read is wrong.”

“So tell me the truth of it.”

“ _Now_?” Cichol snarked, exasperated, his cheeks still pink flushed. Caterina shrugged.

“Or later,” she conceded. His breath caught as she released him to flatten a palm against his chest and slid it downwards across his stomach. “Whenever you like, although I’ll warn you that I’ve never been the sort to be patient.” Her fingers trailed over the dark emerald path blooming beneath his navel. “Just...not even a charitable hand? _Never_?”

“Honestly,” he chided her. It didn’t sound terribly sincere. She grinned, nibbling at his collarbone as her fingers toyed with the base of his cock.

“Surely you’ve used your own,” she continued coyly. His hips bucked upwards into her palm. He grumbled at their betrayal. “You must be an _expert_.”

“Am I supposed to find this enjoyable?” Cichol groaned. Caterina snickered; partly because it was just so _like_ him to be so stubborn even abed, and partly because he was hard and breathy and, quite frankly, a miserable liar.

“Let me show you something you’ll like better.”

She slid along his body with her offer. His fingers scrambled over her shoulders. They gripped tight when she laughed and sunk her teeth into the flesh of his thigh.

“What are you _doing_?”

“You know what I’m doing,” she drawled. A delightful little sound tangled in his throat as she palmed him with a teasing stroke. “Do you want me to stop?”

“Well, _no_ , but,” he said, the words barely escaping him.

“Good,” she purred. He shivered and tipped his head against the pillow, staring into the ceiling like a knelt prisoner awaiting the axe. Always so godsdamned _dramatic_. “Relax.”

She opened her mouth and drew him in slowly, the way men liked when they weren’t so riled that they couldn’t manage to be anything but violent. Cichol moaned and grasped at her like the castaway he’d once insisted he’d been. She peeked at him through her lashes while she dipped and bobbed her head. He’d arched himself forward slightly from the pillow to watch her, his brows knitted tight, mouth parted into a reverent _O_ , and him altogether looking like she’d just unveiled the world’s greatest mysteries to him; explained why the sky was blue, the reason for the red in fire.

What a funny thing. She really was quite fond of him.

* * *

“What the fuck is this?”

Caterina finished buckling her gunbelt with the question, brow cocked at the enormous collection of fruits and trinkets carefully arranged across the front steps leading from her apartments into the town beyond. Cichol stood surprised at her side and smoothed his fingers over his hair. It was what he did when he was nervous, she’d learned; and when he was uncomfortable, or thinking, or maybe just when he was doing anything other than fucking her or balancing the hassle of being frustrated with her. He did it to make sure his pretty ears were hidden, was what her wager was.

“Plums?”

She followed his gaze to a clutch of purple fruit arranged in a bowl. The look of them made her taste their tart flesh on her tongue.

“Passionfruit,” she corrected him. Her stomach rumbled at the idea. The arrangement had the distinct hint of a trap to it but then again, they’d skipped both breakfast and lunch. She knelt to snatch one of the fruits from the bowl and was stopped by a sudden shouted _No!_

A willowy girl appeared from behind the fanned fronds of an Areca palm to bark the order. She had more fruit in her arms: green plantains and a hairy coconut watching three-eyed with the same bewilderment at whatever mistake Caterina had just made.

“ _Aesthkar,_ ” the girl then insisted. She said it with a sweeping bow. The plantains joined a bundle of sugarcane and two bright-skirted dolls on the bottom step. “My lord, for you.”

 _Aesthkar_. Caterina eyed the girl’s bent head with disbelief. She wasn’t familiar with the word, but she did know _aesthe_. It was probably the Briggan language’s most important feature. _Sea_ , it meant. Caterina pressed her fingers against her lips. Her laughter still snuck free, first choked before crashing into a proper guffaw that spooked a pair of parakeets from a nearby tree.

“Caterina,” Cichol tutted, no doubt moved by the girl’s horrified stare. It only made Caterina more giddy. How _ridiculous_. She could barely believe that she was surprised.

“Aesthkar,” she said, clapping Cichol on the shoulder. He bent forward against her palm, brow winched tight in confusion. “Didn’t realize we were so well acquainted, _Lord of the Sea_.”

“Lord?” Cichol snapped incredulously. His lips ticked into a frown that told her he’d realized the poor Briggan girl’s mistake only a few moments too late.

“My Lord!” the girl agreed, shooting upwards to her feet and lurching with a final bow before she retreated from the blasphemy of Caterina’s laughter.

“Wait,” Cichol cried after her futilely, “I am not — would you please stop _laughing_?”

Caterina rubbed at her watering eyes and gave him a conciliatory pat before she bent forward to finally steal one of the fruits at their feet. She slipped the knife from her belt as she did, deftly slicing the passionfruit in half and sucking its yellow flesh from her thumb before offering a piece to Cichol. He seemed too distressed by his recent ascension to godhood to accept, which was just as well to her; she’d never been one to share.

“You have to tell them that I am not a god,” he insisted, trailing in her wake as she carefully picked her way down the stairs. Caterina chewed thoughtfully on a mouthful of seeds before turning to answer.

“Do I?”

“Go on. Grin. How like you to find this amusing, isn’t it?” Cichol snapped. He fiddled with his hair again. It was starting to fray from the humidity. The poor chap: he only had a few hours of neatness in a place like this before he started looking like a guttersnipe.

“More than amusing,” Caterina said. “It seems as though we’ll be well-fed!”

“Caterina!”

Cichol snatched her by the wrist. She sighed, sipping the last bits of juice from her meal before she tossed away the rinds.

“Oh,” she sighed, “don’t have a _conniption_ , darling. It’s hardly a surprise. I have it on good authority that Kalanka doesn’t often play host to sea beasties. You can’t blame them for bad nomenclature.”

“Excuse me — _nomenclature_ — I am not a _beastie_!”

“What word do you prefer, then?” Caterina asked the question coyly, although her gut iced over slightly from the effort of steeling herself against the memories of what had happened before; broken boards on the beach and blue-lipped bodies. She shook her head and donned another crooked smile. “ _Aesthkar_ does have a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“I won’t have them worship me,” Cichol continued tightly. She supposed it was commendable. _Fair enough._

“Alright,” she conceded with the roll of her eyes, “calm down. Don’t worry, I have just the thing to knock you from the heavens and back down here with the rest of us.”

She wouldn’t call the look he gave her _convinced_ , but there was still something to be said about the fact that he followed her when she gestured down a side street with the flourished wave of her hand. There was a lesson to be had about not trusting thieves, of course, but she was relieved that he’d never learned it; nor her the reasonable recommendation that one not turn their back on a sharp-toothed sea monster. _Beastie_ , she corrected herself silently with a smile. She could’ve sworn that she saw him do the same as they strolled together through the sleepy mid-afternoon streets.

* * *

“No,” Cichol demanded venomously. “ _Absolutely not_.” 

“It’s the only way,” Caterina replied sagely. The look he shot her very nearly convinced her that he was a vengeful god, after all.

“I am not going back into that _place_ ,” he spat, arm swinging wide as he gestured at the brothel. Caterina eyed the swoop-backed doors with longing nostalgia before settling her gaze on him again.

“It’s not for that,” she promised him, “although surely you must know that I’d show you a good time.”

“A good time—”

“The tavern is gone,” she interjected neatly. A pair of men approached them before she had the chance to continue. Both of the fellows folded their right hands over their hearts and bowed stiffly at the waist before they sidestepped with polite, mincing steps into the brothel. It looked as though Cichol was readying to bury himself underground.

“There’s no other place for it,” she finished. 

“For _what_ , exactly?”

Caterina grinned. Cichol saw the danger in it; scowled and fiddled with his hair.

“When I first named myself captain,” she explained, taking his hand in hers in order to draw him towards the doors, “half of my men saw me as a lamb ready for the knife, and the rest were convinced that I was a goddess made from tits and silk. Neither make for a good pirate, eh? Do you know what I did?”

“I’d rather not guess,” Cichol answered warily, following her through the well-oiled swing of the doors and looking very much like the lamb she’d described. Caterina snickered.

“I got pissed.”

Caterina turned from him to accept a kiss on the cheek from a pretty girl dressed in nothing but a silver anklet. The girl cooed at her nicely before she recognized Cichol at her side. Then she mimicked the rest of them, bowing forward with a little gasp that left her closer to Cichol than he seemed to like. Caterina smirked as he stepped backwards and knocked into a tall vase, sending it tottering precariously on its rim before it finally settled upright.

“Thank you, darling. Very nice,” Caterina said to the girl, ignoring Cichol’s new beetroot shade. “Find us something to drink, won’t you? Something strong.”

“Of course,” the girl replied, eyes darting between them. “Tomcat. My, er, sir. Lord.”

“Neither,” Cichol countered with a wince.

“Master Aesthkar,” the girl squeaked. Cichol transitioned into a shade of yellow-green.

“Nor that, please—”

“You can call him _baboon_ if it pleases you, sugarplum,” Caterina insisted with a laugh. “Drinks. Wine, not ale.” She fished a pair of coins from her belt and pressed them into the girl’s palm. Not one to disappoint, she trailed her fingers over the girl’s thin wrist afterwards, admiring the delicacy of her periwinkle veins. Cichol cleared his throat. It was enough to finally spook the courtesan towards the collection of wine barrels stored in a nearby arcade.

“I got pissed,” Caterina repeated once the girl had gone. “So drunk I broke a bastard’s nose for calling me _lamb-chop_ and drunker enough that the rest of them realized I’ve never been one for silk. And do you know what it made me the morning after?”

“I can only imagine,” Cichol huffed.

“A woman,” she answered with a wink. “And one with a shit enough temper to impress the men who needed it. Respect isn’t just about power. It’s about showing that you’re all the same. Not a god — just someone with enough hot blood to do what needs to be done when they rest of ‘em are too frightened to remember which way’s up. Ah, there we go, gorgeous, thank you,” she sighed delightedly, accepting a pair of heavy flagons from the courtesan and quickly shoving one in Cichol’s direction. He braced against it, which wasn’t a surprise, but clearly he’d been listening to her lesson, because with an additional wag of her wrist he took the flagon from her. Good for him. She wasn’t certain if even _he_ could do a proper job of quenching her conviction.

“Come over here,” she told him next. She pushed him by the elbow towards a crowded table full of ruddy-faced sailors and their Kalankan counterparts. He obeyed, if dragging his heels when he did, and made a half-decent show of acknowledging the reverent coos and dipping heads that spread across the table as they both took their seats.

“Now, then,” Caterina announced to the lot of them. She snatched a hide purse from her belt and clapped it against the crooked tabletop. “A good bit of honest gold there for whomever can see the bottom of their cups first.”

“Ha! Tomcat, what sort’ve cheat’ve you’ve got now? Holes in yer flagon?”

Caterina grinned, please to see that her wager had distracted the men from Cichol’s divinity.

“Just thirsty,” she challenged. “What? Afraid you’ll piss yourself?”

The man answered by clacking his sloshing flagon against hers. It seemed a good enough starting shot as anything else. The table grunted and hooted as they all bent forward to guzzle down their drinks. Caterina peeked from the corner of her eye as she gulped, and was pleased to see that it only took three of her swallows for Cichol to reluctantly join in.

“ _Pwah_ ,” she finished, mind filling with bubbles as she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Two had drawn their cups dry before she had, although she had the sneaking suspicion that they’d already been empty when they’d started. No matter. The point wasn’t the gold, after all. She shoved the purse across the table at the victors and fished another fistful of coins from a hidden pocket in her jerkin.

“Lucky round. Come on, another.” She waggled her fingers at a towheaded woman with a dozen rings strung through her ears. “It seems my friends here have run a little dry. Give us all something good, won’t you, dandelion?”

“Sure, Tomcat,” the courtesan agreed. “Looking for anything else tonight?”

“Something sweeter?” Caterina guessed. The woman smiled nicely as she portioned out her decanter across the flagons scattered across the tabletop.

“The sweetest,” the courtesan promised. “Milk and honey’s all I eat.

“Hm,” Caterina replied. She heard Cichol’s voice huff into the bowl of his cup.

“Drink!” A one-eyed man insisted from the table’s foot. They all obeyed, first stomping the bottoms of their flagons against the table before they downed them.

Caterina won that round. The courtesan with the rings in her ears took round three from her spot on Caterina’s lap. Round four was a draw made distinct by the moody glances Cichol kept casting at the two women over the rim of his flagon. Round five, and some of them had started slouching from the benches onto the soft cushion of the grass; six and a man named Deos taught Cichol the first two stanzas of a rowdy song about three milkmaids chased into a barn; seven and it was night proper, then, and dark enough for Caterina to see the flicker of something white-hot in Cichol’s eyes.

“Go on, then, darling, that’s a night,” Caterina said, shooing the courtesan away before she’d had a chance to reclaim her seat beside her after she’d refilled their cups. Caterina slipped the pocketwatch she’d won from one of her table mates into the woman’s hand. The woman pouted but seemed satisfied enough to top off their flagons a final time before she turned away.

Cichol took a long drink. Caterina watched the bob of his throat; the color of his cheeks, flushed like a painted doll’s; the way he’d stopped bothering with the drape of his tangled hair, and how the men sitting beside him had seemed to have forgotten that he was a god. She grinned and leaned close to him, drunk enough that her shoulders knocked against his.

“Are you pouting?”

“What’s that?” Cichol cocked a brow at her. It was a sloppy exaggeration of his usual move. “ _Pouting_?”

“Tell me,” Caterina replied, slipping her fingers beneath the table and along his thigh and picturing that blonde courtesan all the while, “have I made you angry?”

“What?”

The word wasn’t wholly convincing. She eyed the sharp edge of his teeth as he spoke; could nearly feel them as they’d once been on her tongue, against her throat. Her fingers traced the shape of his inseam.

“Do you want to own me?”

She asked the question coyly, expecting his regular bedraggled answer in reply. He said nothing instead. It made her feel the heat of him pressed beside her. She swallowed and decided to determine the night a success.

“Let’s go,” she told him, slipping her hand upwards along his hip and grasping sideways for his wrist.

“Go? Where?”

He lurched uncertainly onto his feet as she drug him to them.

“ _Off, off,_ ” one of the men began to sing as they signaled their departure, “ _off’un go, to the high and deep be-low!_ ”

“ _Ke-ey-hole_ ,” another insisted, his drink dripping down his arm as he waved at them with it, “good man. Right upstanding fellow.”

“Good evening to you,” Cichol slurred. It was enough of a wine-drenched, ridiculous moment to make Caterina shrug off the weight of his gaze.

“Come on, then,” she laughed. Cichol stumbled against her as she pulled them both across the brothel yard. _Cichol!_ went the goodnatured chorus as they left, tempered with the occasional _mean ol’ Tomcat_ and fumbled _captains!_ Caterina gave them all a salute before shoving Cichol into the street outside.

“See,” she sighed, sucking in the coolness of the fresh air not filled with sweat and spilled ale, “I told you, you big bastard. God no more.” She slung her arm around his waist and tugged him leftwards. Cichol muttered some word without much meaning, looking clumsily over his shoulder as they staggered forward.

“This isn’t right,” he contested. “Home is _there_.”

“Home?” Caterina laughed. “Settled in, have you? Yes, you bloody lunk, I’m _aware_.” She nearly doubled over from the effort of dragging him further. The world lurched topsy-turvy for a moment before she managed to catch her breath. “You think the great Tomcat, Wretch of the West, the Srengish Bitch, can’t plot her damned path?”

“ _Wretch of the West_ ,” he tested, frowning. She laughed again.

“Almyrans,” she explained. The road softened into loose sand as they strode, sending them both waltzing drunkenly from the drag.

“It’s not very nice,” he mumbled. It took her a moment to realize that he meant the names and not the silver glitter of the moon against the bay ahead.

“I don’t know,” she sighed, stopping to totter forward and kick her feet from her boots. “They seem to suit me.”

“I don’t think so. Where are you going?”

“Swimming,” Caterina explained. She winked. “Let’s cool you off, Aesthkar.”

“Aesthkar!” Cichol barked. Caterina laughed and danced out into the dunes, fiddling with the laces of her jerkin once she saw that Cichol meant to follow. “It’s _not_ my name.”

“What’s in a name?” Caterina paused to pinch her stripped jerkin between her knees and pulled her shirt over her shoulders.

“Everything,” Cichol contended, his voice perplexed, as if she’d just asked him if it was proper to breathe.

“That right? And what does yours mean?”

Caterina loosened the laces of her trousers and came to a stop just at the tideline. Her jerkin was the first to be discarded, folded breast-to-breast and serving to keep the sand from the cotton of her shirt tossed atop it. Her gunbelt went beside it and finally her trousers, looking like the shed skin of some mermaid who’d momentarily won herself legs.

“Well,” Cichol stuttered. Caterina turned and grinned, catching his gaze locked fiercely on the round of her ass. “That isn’t...”

“Tell me,” she insisted, stepping backwards into the surf and savoring the warm water as it licked at her ankles and up her shins.

“It means many things,” Cichol insisted. He’d stumbled after her. Soon he’d be putting the hems of his slacks at danger.

“Take that kit off,” Caterina laughed. “You think I mean to fetch you a full wardrobe? You have enough salt as it is.”

Cichol frowned. No, _pouted_ , just like before. Caterina grinned and rolled her eyes and made a show of waving her arms at him.

“I’ve seen it, darling. _All_ of it. Tasted most of it. No one else here to see it but the crabs, and I don’t wager that they’ve much interest. Come here with me. The water’s lovely. I know you want it, too.”

Cichol seemed to chew it over. She would have called him bashful again if not for how he kept on staring, less bewildered by her nakedness than he seemed intrigued by it. Finally he pulled at the hem of his shirt, altogether less neat than she’d been as he tossed his clothes aside.

“See?” Caterina reached out for him as he stepped forward into the lazy tide. She ringed her fingers around his wrists and skipped backwards until the water crested at her knees. “So tell me. What does it mean, _Cichol_?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You’ve just said it does.”

His dark brows bunched tight. She liked it when they did that, she decided in that moment; maybe that’s what had first charmed her, him glaring at her, his anger so hot it was nearly contrived.

“Leg,” he muttered finally, eyes darting to the side. A surprised breath scuffed between her teeth.

“ _Leg?_ ” Certainly that wasn’t right.

“Legless,” Cichol said, his voice so quiet that the silence of the midnight ocean nearly swallowed it up. _Legless_. She stared back at him, flabbergasted.

“Like a _snake_ ,” she tested, doing her damndest not to laugh.

“No,” he huffed.

“Like a _sea snake_.”

“It’s an old name,” he insisted. They sloshed deeper into the water. Now it ebbed at her waist, teasing at the healed stagger of her spine.

“I’m sure,” she reassured him.

“ _Caterina_ ,” he begged her miserably, missing a syllable along the way.

“Show me,” she soldiered on.

“What?”

“Show me who you are. The rest of them’ve seen.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he muttered, as if in reflex. Caterina rolled her eyes.

“That never worked, and it isn’t working now, either, darling. Is there a reason that you won’t? A good one, at least?”

They stopped moving. Her heels teased at the edge of the shelf below them that would soon dip into the depths of the bay. Cichol stared at her glumly from beneath the dark curtain of his lashes.

“You’re drunk,” he mumbled finally. Caterina laughed.

“So are you.”

“It’ll frighten you.”

“Fuck you,” she snapped. “I took you, don’t you remember? Snatched you up from the sea. You think I did it because I was frightened?”

“Or foolish,” he countered, heckles raised, although the pink flush of his cheeks and the way the tepid waves were nearly knocking him sideways somewhat ruined the effect. “I could’ve sunk you.”

“You didn’t, and you couldn’t,” Caterina argued. She wasn’t so certain about the second part, but it was at least satisfying to say. “Show me. I want to see. Or maybe I’ll just swim out there to that deep bit and drown. Drunk, you call me?” She decided on it in that moment, grinning as she swung her arms up in a swan dive to suddenly rush deeper into the water.

“Caterina!”

“Won’t surprise a-one of them,” she sung over her shoulder. “Poor old Tomcat, pickled like a radish, gone out to sea. Should have happened sooner, honestly.”

The sand below her feet gave way to the freeing depths. The kick of her legs in the water made her shiver with pleasure. It didn’t make for a convincing display of drowning, but that didn’t really seem to matter. She heard Cichol sigh as he swam forward and then she watched, bewitched, as he dipped his head below the water.

Bubbles gathered in a halo at the spot where he’d gone. For a moment it was like he’d never been there. Maybe that was the truth. Certainly everything that’d come to pass seemed a formidable enough hallucination. Caterina had lived a long while under the sun, after all; and drunk her fair share of saltwater, moreover, and twice that plus twenty servings more of wine.

But then the water crested. It reminded her of a take at sea: barrels bobbing upwards into the bloodstained surf. The water turned to churn as it dripped down silver scales and the fluted point of a crooked snout. Long, sailcloth-colored strands of something silken spread across the surface, connected to sharp spines and a pair of dragging things that might’ve been horns if seen suspended underwater.

He wasn’t beautiful, not like what she’d once seen so delicately illustrated in books about the Nabateans, them all impressive beings built from silver in the shapes of horned horses and eagle-beaked lions. She was instead reminded of what she’d thought when she’d first seen him — that he was huge, like a whale, but writhing; adorned with the wispy beard of some lesser catfish caught in the mud; and with the jagged teeth of the barracuda which crowded slack-jawed beneath ships when they docked. _Frightening_ was the better word for him, just like he’d said, but then again, it wasn’t as if there was much different between beauty and fright. Both could be overwhelming.

“Incredible,” Caterina gasped. She swam closer to him, treading water as she reached out with a tentative hand to trace the water trickling down the side of his narrow face. The moon was bold and full. She could see each part of him; how the sharp slivers of his pupils dilated and disappeared as he tracked her movements, and next the flash of some sort of translucent eyelid as it skimmed the enormous rounds of his eyes; the feathery gills ringing his throat, half-submerged and fluttering. “Look at you.”

She slowly circled him, her fingertips never losing the slickness of his skin as she examined each smooth-and-sharp part of him. Her legs skimmed against his body as she swam. She could see the moonlit glimmer of him coiling far and deep into the depths. It made a prickle of fear take root in her stomach, reminiscent of the terror that’d always seized her as a girl when she’d gone swimming and had suddenly realized that she couldn’t see anything beneath her feet.

“Can you speak?”

“Yes,” he answered before she had the chance to feel foolish for having asked. His voice was still his, although it sounded as though she’d dunked her head underwater to listen to it, muffled and dreamy as it was in her ears.

“Incredible,” she said again. “Why would you ever change yourself into a man?”

The water sloshed as he turned to look at her. He somehow captured his usual bewilderment even without the benefit of his hairy brows.

“It’s... _lonely_ ,” he managed finally. The words pierced her chest. Yes, of course it would be lonely. What a fool she’d been to ask. She slipped closer to him and pressed her cheek against the palm-sized scales just above his gills. 

“But do you like it? Being like this?”

“Yes,” he admitted. Somehow he made his voice quiet, even though it seemed to reverberate through each breath and gasp of wind in the air. “It can be... _difficult_ , once you’ve known the sea, to live on land.”

Caterina laughed, even though she didn’t find the sentiment so terribly funny. Yes, to live on land...She closed her eyes and listened to his heartbeat for awhile.

“You must want more than the shallows,” she realized later, suddenly aware of the way his body had become nearly knotted beneath her feet. She pushed backwards from him to tread water again. “Go on, then. Fancy a swim?”

His eerie stare fixed on her, seemingly unconvinced.

“It was a jest, that drowning bit” she promised him dryly. “I know damn well how to keep my head above water. Go on. I don’t mind some time alone.” She gestured at the horizon line for good measure, fingertips flicking glittering droplets across the surf. Cichol sunk slightly into the water. His whiskers spread along the surface, coiling in the current like a cat’s tail wagged when it tries to puzzle something out.

“You could swim with me,” he offered finally, somehow managing to conjure _bashful_ out of the snap of his gnarled jaw.

“I think my breaststroke might leave something to be desired,” Caterina answered, brows raised at the very idea of somehow keeping pace with him. He snapped a mouthful of water and wagged his head.

“That isn’t what I suggested,” he endeavored on. She realized what he meant a moment later, her eyes settling on the thorny spines making a crown out of the back of his head.

“Are you proposing that I _ride_ you?”

Even though he didn’t, she could have sworn he rolled his eyes.

“Forget it.”

“Darling,” she laughed, “you should have just asked. I don’t mind it, you know. You wouldn’t be the first man to—”

“Caterina,” Cichol snapped. “I’m making an offer to you, not asking for some sort of...of lewd _soldier’s tale_.”

“You’re jealous,” she accused again, memories of that blonde courtesan still lingering in her mind. Cichol sunk deeper into the water until she could only make out the green of his eyes.

“Do you find it so strange?” he bubbled from beneath her. His honesty punched the satisfaction from her teasing. She frowned.

“It was only a jape,” she promised him, reaching forward to drag her fingers along his scales again. “Will you really let me? Won’t I slow you down?”

“You’re very small,” he argued. She nearly argued the point before she realized that it was a lost battle.

“Well,” she countered, “what am I supposed to do? I don’t imagine you have a saddle, do you?”

“It’s not as if I have much experience with a rider,” he said before he caught himself. She pictured what it would look like for a sea serpent to blush, not that he seemed to have the capability, or at least not in the moon’s silver wash. “I imagine it would be best if you held on tight.” He wagged his head with the suggestion. The long tendrils of his horn-like whiskers trailed behind him in the water.

“I won’t hurt you?”

“Does it seem as though you will?”

Caterina smirked; _fair enough_. She watched him for a moment, just waiting for him to bare his needly teeth in a grin to betray his joke, but finding nothing but his serious stare she slowly swam to his back. With an awkward paddle of her arms she found a way to straddle him, shivering slightly from the cold slick of his scales as she pressed her bare body against him and found her grip on his ropy horns.

“Alright,” she told him uneasily. He slid slowly forward with a testing swing of his head. “Just remember that I don’t breathe water, understand?”

“Understood,” Cichol answered. Something in his voice had already changed. He’d sounded drunk before, of course, but now he sounded _easy_ ; pleased, even. Relieved. She felt his muscles coil beneath her as he built his pace into a more proper swim. It kicked the wind into her hair. Soon she realized that they were flying, although the sea still rushed around her body, churned to whitewater by their pace. Her breath caught in her lungs. It was amazing — the stars streaked to snowfall above their heads and the salt of the ocean sublimated into lace, and all of it inconsequential to the power of Cichol’s body as it fully unfurled.

 _This is it_ , she thought, thrilled laughter building in her throat; _everything_. Speed, power, and the dark enormity of the sea spreading itself open for them. She was transported to the _Sea Snake_ ’s bow, pistols drawn and hunger in her teeth as she stared down a fresh conquest. Cichol seemed spurred by her giddy yips and howls, snaking ever-faster through the waves, arching upwards high enough that she could see their moon-shadow on the surface before diving quick into the sea again. Somehow she managed to cling to him through it all, her laughter spilling into the water as nakedly as it did into the wind. 

_Faster, faster. More, more._ She laughed until it made her hoarse and then for even longer, until she realized that somehow she’d started sobbing. _Never again_ , a voice inside her promised; _ten years_ said another. Ten years was what it’d cost to take the _Sea Snake_ , and how many times had she come too close to death when she’d tried? Even then it hadn’t been her courage that’d brought her the frigate, nor her pistols, and hardly her ambition. It’d just been luck. Cruel, capricious luck. Why would that fickle goddess smile on Caterina twice?

And even if she did, the times were changing. Any captain worth their salt had seen it coming for years. Almyra had grown tired of losing its riches in the sea, and had instead made itself dangerous with wyvern and bow; Dagda had done the same, and Albinea had never tolerated being plundered without a fight. Caterina had no doubt that the continent’s newly-made King of Liberation would be no different. Look at what he’d done to all of those silver-made wonders in Zanado. And besides, she would never find a mean ship like the _Snake_ again. So what would be her prize? Ten more years of crawling on her belly through salt and blood, and some miserable wreck to keep her until she finally joined her father’s bones?

Caterina swallowed her sobbing and pressed her face against Cichol’s scales. The clean smell of him settled her as much as the respectful silence he kept, his focus still on their rushing path despite the fact that he must’ve heard her pitiful weeping. Not that she deserved pity; all of this, it was better than being dead. Even she wasn’t prideful enough to say that she would’ve preferred to have gone down with her ship.

It was just that the infinite spread of the ocean had suddenly become daunting where it’d always been a comfort before. What was a life without a prize? She felt desperately along Cichol’s spines, distracting herself with their sharp points pricking the pads of her fingers. What was it to live on land once you knew the sea?

* * *

“Good of you to visit, Tomcat,” Calosus told her weeks later over their shared lunch of fowl and cockles. 

“Did you miss me so terribly?” Caterina grinned at him despite the way that the cockles’grey slime had turned her stomach the moment she’d first stepped foot through Calosus’ door. She swallowed it down with a mouthful of tea and did her best not to be disappointed by the leaves. Always tea with him and Piero both, the damned bland bastards. They might’ve ruled the world with their muscles and their brains if they didn’t have such shitty taste.

“Always,” Calosus agreed, taking a moment to smear a gob of butter across a slice of crusty bread. “Although I suppose that means that you’ve been kept well entertained.”

“This old place always does the trick,” Caterina said. She picked at the golden-roasted bird on her plate and cleared her throat before the bile crawling at its base bubbled upwards to join the rest of the table’s spread. Gods damn it all. It wasn’t like the pillow house to serve her spoiled ale, and yet she’d been in misery for days since her last visit. It’d been enough that even Cichol’s recommendation that she perhaps suspend her drinking tourneys had sounded convincing. Or maybe she was just getting long in the tooth. She supposed one could only be a louse for so many years.

“I appreciate your efforts on the eastern quarter, by the way,” Calosus continued smoothly. “Your men have made quick work of the houses there. My people are relieved to sleep under roofs again.” He chewed a mouthful of buttered bread and looked at her fondly. “You know, of course, that this is an understatement. I think most of them are of the mind for secession.”

“Ha,” Caterina replied with the roll of her eyes. She attempted a forkful of birdflesh and did her best not to focus on the soured water filling her mouth. Disgusting, and worse off that she couldn’t even appreciate Calosus’ cooking. Well, not _Calosus_ ’, but that sweet woman in the kitchens who always snuck her extra custard if she asked nicely enough. She loved that woman; would’ve asked her to adopt her if she knew that she wouldn’t make a terrible daughter. “And what would that make me?”

“Queen, they could call you, and bad luck for me,” Calosus laughed. “Although I don’t know how long your reign. In any case, one little island isn’t much of a kingdom. I’d recommend a different path ahead.”

“I tend to agree with you,” Caterina said. “I—”

She paused. Her stomach’s duel with her lunch had ended and, unfortunately, not on her terms. She lurched to her feet and stumbled desperately for the nearby window. Open, thank the gods. She gripped at the sill and retched, hoping with closed eyes that no pitiable porter was below.

“Oh my,” Calosus called from behind her, “are you alright?”

Caterina waved a dismissive hand over her shoulder.

“Don’t bother,” she said as she heard him stand, no doubt to hunt her out a drink of water. She spat again and wiped her lips before turning woozily to face him. “Seems I’ve outgrown drinking the way I want to.”

Calosus frowned.

“You don’t mean to say that Lelana’s pillow houses have been serving you sullied goods?”

“Sullied goods? What do you mean, saggy tits?” Caterina laughed. “No, no. It’s in my belly, not theirs. You know me. Always eating things I shouldn’t. Not all of us have your blessed cook.”

“Hm,” Calosus replied. He looked her over with a piercing stare, his hands perched pertly on his hips. It made Caterina feel suddenly ridiculous, like a little girl caught with a stolen doll. Her stomach dropped (again, gods damn it, as if the rest wasn’t enough) when a strange little smile skittered across his lips.

“What is it? You smug bastard, don’t give me a look like that.”

He waved his palms at her apologetically, although it didn’t wipe the grin from his lips.

“What sort of look? Of course, you’re right; it seems I owe you congratulations instead.”

“What?” Caterina cocked a brow at him. There didn’t seem to be so much to congratulate about the current situation. She’d sunk her damned ship, after all, as if the man wasn’t aware. She followed his gaze, suddenly fixated on her stomach, and then rolled her own eyes so swiftly that it was a wonder they didn’t tumble from their sockets. “Very amusing, Calosus. If I thought _that_ every time I drunk myself sick I’d be a mother of a thousand.” 

_Besides_ , she nearly said, although Calosus would no doubt be uninterested in the specifics; besides, Naima was so _skillful_ with those bitter draughts of hers, and ever since Caterina had chased Cichol into her bed Caterina had been exceptionally diligent about drinking them. Honestly, it was probably _them_ that’d made her sick, all brewed from dandelion root and pennyroyal and a hundred different rotten things, judging by the smell. Just the memory of it made Caterina’s gut roil once more. And it wasn’t like she’d never _tested_ it, this thing Calosus was proposing. She’d slept with enough men before.

“Not a thousand,” Calosus agreed, still grinning in that infuriatingly harmless way of his, “but perhaps one.”

“Oh, for—”

 _Slept with enough men_ , that voice inside her repeated, just that Cichol wasn’t much of a _man_ at all, now was he? Caterina’s retort died in her throat. She stared at Calosus’ fond smile and felt herself fill with needlepoints. Her ankles turned to jelly. She gripped herself upright by the nearest chair, the vice of her knuckles so tight that the wood creaked.

“ _Fuck_.”


	6. The Albatross

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Please note that the next few chapters will contain (non graphic) content about pregnancy and childbirth.

Maybe she wouldn’t tell Cichol a godsdamned thing.

It wasn’t entirely fair to resent him for the child he’d put inside her. Of her many misdeeds, surely this one required an equal split of responsibility between two parties. And yet, despite his various neuroses — from pink-fleshed birds he insisted were grilled too quickly and fish he regarded with an upturned nose as having been left too long over a fire, to his warnings that she spent too much time under the sun and too little of it doing anything worthwhile— fatherhood had never been something he’d fretted over. Damn him for it.

Maybe she would run. That was the second plan to manifest itself between her ears after she’d decided to blame Cichol for everything. It was even less reasonable than the first. She couldn’t run from her own belly. What good would it do for her to run from _him_? And besides, there wasn’t very far to go in Kalanka. She was a good swimmer, but not good enough to backstroke her way to the next island along Brigid’s long tail. In any case, there was no other place nearly as welcoming to infamous pirates as Calosus’ hideaway.

“What if it’s worms?” was plan number three, suggested to Naima as they both inspected the gentle swell of Caterina’s stomach.

“ _Worms_?” Naima echoed, disgusted. She’d dressed herself in a pretty patch embroidered with mother of pearl. It was promising. Maybe with time she’d stop hiding her scarred face behind her hair. Caterina hated watching her shrink behind everyone when she’d been so stubborn about shoving her way between them before, but neither days nor months would do any favors for Naima’s missing eye, just like they were nothing but bad omens for Caterina’s predicament, too.

“Or a growth,” Caterina offered next. “Some sort of carbuncle?”

Naima smirked and shook her head.

“You’d better pray it isn’t a carbuncle, you damned fool,” she said, pressing her cool fingers against Caterina’s navel. “What do you expect me to do? Cut you open?”

“Well—”

Naima smacked her thigh.

“Don’t jest about those sorts of things,” Naima warned. “You won’t like what I tell you.”

“Fine,” Caterina sighed. She shoved the hem of her shirt back towards her belt and gently nudged Naima aside. “Some help you are.”

“I’m not,” Naima agreed. “I’m not familiar with these arts. Not so many of your men give birth, you know.”

“I don’t know. Never thought to ask them,” Caterina drawled. She took a swig of water from a glass Naima had poured for her earlier, and stared listlessly through the window of the little apartment that the healer had taken for her own. A fragrant frangipani tree was planted just beyond the sill. Caterina did her best to focus on the flowers instead of her perpetual dread.

“Of everything that’s happened,” Naima suggested suddenly, her voice lightening in that way it did when she was amused enough to challenge Caterina’s various follies, “I don’t understand why you’ve taken this one as the worst.”

Caterina snorted.

“Oh yes,” she replied sardonically. “What better mother than me? I’ll raise the whelp just like myself — sucking on goats’ tits and calling my papa’s two-bit whores _mama_ because mine’s already buried bones.”

Naima winced. It didn’t dissuade Caterina from charging on.

“And maybe, if I’m lucky, Kalanka will tell me that the creature is some godsdamned demigod and snatch it up to gild in their godsdamned temple.”

“Oh, Caterina, enough.”

“Enough? I’m just getting started. What do you think? What better mantle for it, eh? Pirate scourge? Hm? Or will it be the heir of a fucking hermit?”

“I don’t know if Cichol is a _hermit_ ,” Naima interjected incredulously. “Just today I saw him teaching Calosus how to tune his mandolin.”

“Semantics? Is that what we’re going to talk about?”

Naima planted her hands on her hips and shot Caterina a truly venomous glare.

“We’re not going to talk about any of this,” she insisted icily. “What did _he_ say?”

Caterina bit her lip and looked away.

“Damned if I know,” she grumbled. She heard Naima huff.

“You haven’t told him,” Naima guessed. Caterina fiddled with her gunbelt. “You must be nearly four months along. How have you not told him?”

“You’ve always said that I’m so very clever,” Caterina quipped. Naima groaned at the suggestion and rolled her eye, which was a bit dizzying to observe firsthand.

“He hasn’t noticed,” Caterina clarified glumly. Naima sighed.

“Both of you are hopeless.”

Caterina scoffed and threw herself into a nearby chair.

“Thank you, very kind.”

“You’re certain that it’s his child?” Naima asked next, keeping Caterina trapped beneath her gaze.

“Unless you’ve managed it yourself, and with quite the slow-growing seed,” Caterina replied. “In which case I suppose it may very well be a demigod.”

“Oh, Caterina,” Naima huffed again. She strode forward to join her in an adjacent chair. “Waiting won’t do you any favors. What is it that you’ve got planned? Hiding the babe in with the cabbages once it’s born?”

“No cabbages in Kalanka,” Caterina grumbled, scuffing the toe of her boot as she did.

“ _Tomcat_.”

“Well, what am — what is it?” Caterina startled, looking up to catch Naima suddenly looking at her with a new and thoroughly perturbed stare.

“Nothing,” Naima replied quickly. Too quickly. _Fuck_. Caterina knew what her _nothings_ meant. She stood and crossed the two steps between them to lean over Naima with a demanding eye.

“What is it, Naima?”

Naima fidgeted, busying herself with the task of tucking a dark curl behind her ear as she looked aside.

“Nothing,” she said finally. “I’m certain that it’s nothing.”

“Nothing of what sort? Enlighten me.” Caterina used her captain’s tongue for the last two words. Naima shivered under the successful showing.

“Of the sort,” Naima offered uneasily, “with scales and gills. Isn’t that how you’ve described him?”

Caterina cocked a brow.

“Yes,” she said. “Go on.”

“Well, I... I suppose I’ve never seen a creature with scales and gills give birth to a babe before.”

“What?”

Naima peeked over at her. Caterina’s mouth grew dry as she suddenly was reminded of all of the little, red, jewel-like eggs Calosus so loved to sprinkle over everything he ate.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she let whistle between her teeth before she turned and stormed towards the door.

“Oh, Caterina,” Naima barked. “What the hell are you — hold on. Hold on!”

Sand sprayed in Caterina’s wake as she sped through Kalanka’s middle parts. The sun was beginning to dip towards the horizon after lingering above their heads for a long and lazy while. At that time of day Cichol was often in the schoolyard, which was just so godsdamned fucking _ironic_ , now wasn’t it?

“Key!”

She shouted the name like a call to arms. Her voice echoed against the bowl of the craggy ridge which crowded Kalanka against the bay. A sprig of childish _oohs_ and giggles answered, followed after by the glitter of peeking eyes through the schoolhouse’s open windows.

“Key!”

She braced herself in a broad stance six paces from the schoolhouse door. Cichol emerged from the cool shadows inside, a book still splayed open in one hand as he looked her over with a thoroughly befuddled stare.

“Caterina? What is it? Is everything alright?”

Two toddling babes ran to his side. They giggled behind their hands, reading her fury far better than their newly self-appointed teacher had managed himself.

“You,” Caterina growled, leveling an accusatory finger at him as she fought the urge to use a pistol instead. “Did you know?”

Cichol’s face settled into the usual stubborn shape it took when he realized he had to stare her down.

“Did I know _what_ , exactly?”

“Am I going to lay a _fucking egg_?”

Cichol gaped at her and dropped his book in a futile effort to clap his hands over the innocent ears of one of the children at his side. As if they’d never heard the word before. Where did he think they’d been born?

“What are you talking about?” he snapped. Caterina watched with bemusement as his face turned an overcast grey while his brain caught up to the resounding echo of her cry.

“ _What_ ,” he repeated, this time a whisper. Suddenly he was astounded. It dissolved some of the vinegar and thunder that had brought her there. The children giggled a final time before their interest flagged and lured them into tugging at each other’s sleeves.

 _Well, shit_ , she could‘ve said. Then again, she’d learned her lesson about foul mouths. This time she kept quiet.

* * *

“You’re sure that you’re alright?” he quizzed her after they’d marched together in mean-spirited silence back to her apartments. Caterina crossed her arms against his inquiry, spreading her legs further apart in defiance as he crowded her seat at the edge of her — _their_ — bed. 

“Yes,” she snarled, although of course that wasn’t the appropriate answer if she was growing a godsdamned _egg_ inside her. Or worse. A hundred of them. _Two_ hundred. _Fuck_. Cichol’s brows stitched together as he no doubt watched her horror sketch across her face.

“Caterina,” he sighed, his voice turned from his stern tutor’s tone into something softer and far more vulnerable. “Be honest with me.”

“Is that what I owe you? After everything you’ve done?”

“What is it that I’ve done?”

No doubt he wanted to look wise and serious with his retort, but the way his eyes darted shyly towards her belly ruined the effect. To be honest, everything about how he was behaving himself had botched all of her shoddily-laid plans. He looked like one of his damned schoolchildren, suddenly shy and confused, as if she’d asked him to recite his history lesson after he’d daydreamed through her lecture.

“Caterina,” he tried again, “I... I do not mean to be untoward, but are you _certain_ that you are—”

She snatched his hand before he had the chance to finish his question and pressed his palm against the swell of her belly. His brows darted towards his hairline as his lips slacked into a funny little shape, both mustered from the touch of something they’d somehow both managed to ignore for far too long.

“Well,” he breathed. She watched him with a fiery gaze, just begging him to ask her if the child was his. He might have charmed her ever so slightly with his bashful bluster, but she was still convinced that she had enough strength in her arms to break at least three of his fingers if he attempted something as stupid as _that_.

“Well,” he said again with a quiet cough. Her smirk smoothed infinitesimally less sharp at the pink flush spilling across his cheeks. “I see.” His fingers stroked through her shirt, seemingly of their own accord. Mustering all of her good graces, she decided not to swat them.

“I...” Cichol continued, his voice suddenly half size as he peeked at her through his lashes, “I must admit that this is not something of which I can call myself an expert.”

Caterina snorted.

“Not so complicated an arithmetic,” she drawled. “What is it, your father never taught you the lesson?”

Cichol shook his head.

“I did not have a father,” he admitted.

“Another thing we share,” she snapped, “funny as it is that I’ve still managed to learn the basics with only one parent to call my own.”

“No,” he replied with another wag of his head, “what I mean to say is that...”

He sat backwards on his heels, working over his lip with his teeth as he suddenly gathered her hands into his. Caterina frowned. This was the sort of pose that men used when they said something dire. She didn’t much have the wherewithal for much more bad news.

“My mother,” he attempted slowly, newly unable to match Caterina’s gaze, “gave birth to me alone.”

“Mhm,” Caterina said, unsure of just what the hell he was trying to say, and certainly not why he sounded as though she was torturing him for the information. He glanced quickly at her and looked away.

“I do not think you understand,” he offered. She huffed a bemused breath through her nose. He squeezed her hands in response, which she found annoyingly comforting, of course. “I and all of my siblings... We were as pots crafted from clay.”

“Key,” Caterina snarked, “you’re a complicated enough creature without metaphor. What the hell are you trying to say?”

Cichol’s face fell. She wasn’t certain if it was from her reprimand, or simply from his lost storytelling opportunity. Him and his damned fables.

“My mother both birthed me and served as my sire,” he said. A frustrated wrinkle formed between his brows when she didn’t reply. “I have no father. I _required_ no father.”

“Are you saying that your mother fucked herself?”

“ _Caterina_ ,” he groaned, blanching, as if that was the worst damned thing she’d ever said. Caterina rolled her eyes. “I certainly wouldn’t use such — that wasn’t — she simply _made_ me.”

“So you’ve always been a gullible man, then,” Caterina countered dryly. The first spark of true anger flickered to life in his eyes. Good. She was desperate for a fight. No better way to burn away the trepidation that’d been poisoning her for weeks.

“It is the truth,” he answered sternly. “I am nothing like your kind.”

“ _My kind_? Yes, and what are we? Sad little mongrels breeding in the dirt? Is that it?”

“That isn’t what I said.”

“It’s _absolutely_ what you said. You enjoyed it at least, didn’t you? Playing human for a while? Wagging around your blessed, divine cock?”

She slipped free from his grip and knocked him backwards with her knees in order to rise from the bed. He stood as well, following after her with a quick step as she made to escape the bedroom.

“Caterina—”

“What other stories do you have for me, hm? Do tell me, I’m just so very _curious_ ,” she spat. His fingers coiled around her wrist. She tugged against them, storming towards the door in spite of his eerie strength. “Good show, by the way, you being so worried about Kalanka calling you a god, but it seems as though I’ve got a different set of rules, eh? What, you want me on my knees, do you? Want me to—”

“I’m frightened, too!” Cichol snapped. His voice was loud and rushed. It wasn’t like him. “I’m frightened, too,” he repeated, this time slowly, as if she were a spooked mare to calm. “I was certain that it was...impossible.”

“Impossible,” she repeated breathlessly. “Your people made up a great city. You expect me to believe that not a single one of you ever thought to unbutton your fucking trousers?”

“It was forbidden,” he answered with the quick shake of his head.

“ _Forbidden_ ,” Caterina mocked. “And would you like me to draft a list of all of the forbidden things I’ve done?”

“Well, I will admit that you are...different from the women I once knew as a young man,” he replied with the slightest quirk of his lips. His fingers loosened around her wrist. For some reason she didn’t take the opportunity to run. “I’ve never lied to you,” he added. “I have no intention of starting now.”

“You told me that you were shipwrecked,” she reminded him dryly. He flinched at the contention.

“Well,” he amended, looking to a far corner, “that was before I came to know you.”

“You told me that you were the last of your crew,” she continued on, stepping a pace closer to him. “You told me that you were a man. Why should I believe you?”

“Because I care for you,” Cichol answered simply. She frowned with the realization that she’d never heard the phrase before— not from him nor from anyone, really. It deflated her next biting response, allowing him the time to continue. “For who you are and _what_ you are, to be entirely honest with you. Zanado is — was — a complicated place.” He busied his fingers by combing through his hair, suddenly unable to look her in the eye once more.

“People — your people — they lived among us. And my siblings... we were all of the same blood, you understand?” His cheeks darkened. “So it only stands to reason that if one was to take a lover, that they would turn to them — the humans, that is. I always assumed that not every one of my brothers and sisters followed my mother’s rules, but if there was ever a birth in Zanado, it was perfectly hidden. And they were all miserable gossips,” he added, his voice turning a bit sharp. “So I thought to myself, what was the chance of that truly happening? My siblings, keeping _secrets_? Or would it be simpler to accept the fact that Nabateans and men were simply like...like cats and dogs?”

“Cats and dogs,” Caterina repeated incredulously, one brow cocked at him as he fidgeted beneath her stare.

“Yes,” he managed. “I’ve seen quite a bit of the world after leaving my home, Caterina, and I’ve yet to find a purring pup. And yet...” He wrung his hands. “And yet I must admit that the nature of my upbringing has perhaps made me slightly naive to the way of many things.”

Caterina snorted.

“But to your original question,” he persevered, this time miserably, “I am... I am relatively certain that you will not... lay... an egg.”

“Relatively certain,” she repeated with a croak. He flinched as she lurched forward to seize him by the collar. “I need a little more than _relativity_ , Key!”

A grim look shadowed his face.

“There is someone who may know more,” he said glumly. Caterina’s knuckles whitened with the winch of her grip. “I can write to him, although I can’t promise much of anything in terms of actual help.” His eyes darted sideways. “He is a... _difficult_ creature.”

“Who?” Caterina asked, bereft of what mild good nature she could usually offer in response to his stuffy, meandering _everything_ s.

“My brother,” he told her, both words dipped with enough dread that she could have sworn he’d said something about executioners instead. “Macuil.”

* * *

Caterina had been expecting an outrageous affair after Cichol sent his brother a summons, and had received, one long month later, a simple _very well_ scribbled in response across a stained scrap of parchment, and she’d always been proud of her sense of imagination. And yet somehow the enormous, vaguely vulture-like beast which made a shadow out of Kalanka’s central market only a day after they’d received Macuil’s tepid response shamed even her wildest daydreams. 

Both the Kalankans and what was left of her crew scattered at the sight of the beast’s enormous wingspan. Caterina could only wonder if perhaps this was the end: not burning alive or drowning or being crushed by ugly-fucking-Albineans, but rather by being gobbled up by an overgrown bird who apparently lacked a certain sense of fraternal admiration for the godsdamned outsized snake she’d made into a lover. What a way to go — as if she didn’t deserve it.

“Macuil,” Cichol sighed, turning from their half-finished lunch to watch in dismay as his brother crushed a cart of mangoes under him with his arrival. Caterina chewed on a ring of pickled radish and kept in her chair, deciding in that moment that she might as well meet her maker well-fed. “Damned _bastard_.”

She rose her brows at that. She’d been making progress at scrubbing off Cichol’s shiny veneer as their months spent on Kalanka grew in number, but even she hadn’t won many curses from him. Maybe she’d like this Macuil, after all, as long as he didn’t make a breakfast out of her.

“Brother,” Macuil boomed, his voice a flutier version of his brother’s and already sounding twice as sly. “How lovely to see you after all of this time.”

“Macuil!” Cichol shouted, rising from his seat to descend from the portico where they’d been enjoying their meal in order to approach the winged monster snuffling and tossing its head in the middle of the abandoned market. “Make no mistake that I will hold you liable for any destruction you make in this place!”

Macuil clacked his beak and spread his wings in protest before beginning the work of shrinking down to a more agreeable size. A slender man took the beast’s place. There was no doubt that he shared Cichol’s blood, but in him all of his brother’s broad angles had been made smooth and lithe. His hair was a darker shade of evergreen and, she noted with some amusement, neatly braided into a long tail that Cichol had still stubbornly foresworn himself. Macuil was very briefly nude in the same way that Cichol always found himself after an indulgent swim, but with the quick flick of his fingers was clothed in a set of long, navy-colored robes.

“ _Cichol_ ,” he purred, stepping forward over a smashed mango to offer a slim hand in his brother’s direction. Cichol failed to take it, for whatever Macuil intended him to do with it. Macuil seemed unaffected, instead fluttering his fingers for a moment before he let them fall to his side. “And don’t you look the very image of how I imagined you to be. You always were so... _rugged_ , weren’t you?”

“Thank you for coming,” Cichol replied flatly. Macuil laughed. Caterina heard the prattle of gulls in his laughter, which made her smirk despite the motion no doubt being made of poor manners. At least Cichol’s back was turned to her so that she wouldn’t earn his usual reprimand.

“Why, however could I not? How many years has it been since I saw you last, little brother, and imagine my surprise when you begged my assistance with a problem _most dire_. As if I could deny you my assistance. So what is it, then? Have you intended to make a hoard of this quaint little place, and found yourself unmeasured for the task?” He tutted. “You always were of such a gentle nature, sweet, dearest Cichol. Come let elder brother take care of these pesky little pests.”

“Absolutely not,” Cichol snapped. Caterina watched Macuil’s dark brows — thinner than Cichol’s, of course, but with the same unkempt shape that she’d begrudgingly grown to admire —twitch at his brother’s response. Macuil sighed, crossing his long sleeves over his chest as he glanced across the market. “Not a single spell, Macuil.”

“Well, then, why ever am I here? Was it a ruse simply to find yourself in my graces once more? No need to be coy.”

Cichol glanced quickly over his shoulder at Caterina, no doubt in some unrestrained impulse that he immediately regretted. Caterina tapped her fingers along the long snout of one of her pistols spread across the table while Macuil followed his brother’s gaze. She wondered idly how long it would take to pluck away all of his feathers if she were to shoot him between the eyes. Macuil made a little noise before stepping a few paces closer.

“What a brave little bird to have not already flown away,” Macuil observed, his emerald eyes now fixed on her. She watched the muscles in Cichol’s back tighten as he stiffly turned to watch his brother’s approach. “Have you made yourself a companion, Cichol? I never took you for a keeper of pets...”

Macuil’s wry smile faltered with his next step. Caterina felt the weight of his gaze on her stomach, which had grown ever rounder in the month that had passed from the time before when she’d otherwise explained it away. Now it was an ever-present anvil warping her sun-softened shirts, although she did take some pleasure in smoothing the fabric taut now that Macuil had begun the process of looking bewildered.

“Cichol...” he started, his long fingers weaving over his lips. He hunched slightly forward. Caterina spotted his shoulders shaking, and realized a moment later that he was laughing. “Oh, _Cichol_. Out of _everyone_... _Gracious_. What would Mother say?”

“Macuil,” Cichol warned darkly, stepping to his side.

“Never would I have thought that you would be the one to vie for her damnable title,” Macuil continued, his words half-choked by laughter. “And this mangled creature is who you choose? Surely—”

She and Macuil both were startled silent when Cichol suddenly tore Macuil sideways by his collar. Dark magic crackled to life between Macuil’s fingers, but he kept his hands palm-forward and steadily raised at his own shoulders to dissuade Cichol from making good on the vicious snarl that had filled his face.

“Very well,” Macuil puffed, bending backwards against Cichol’s unyielding grip. “I suppose one cannot account for poor taste.”

Caterina snorted. She popped a final radish into her mouth before she stood and finally strolled to meet the two men at the bottom of the portico’s steps. Macuil flinched and scowled when she smacked her palm against his shoulder.

“How lovely,” she drawled. “Already something we can agree upon.”

* * *

They salvaged the last of the mangoes and reset their lunch table for three. Caterina was bemused to find that Macuil shared his brother’s affection for tea. She refused her own serving in exchange for yet another cupful of water and crushed ginger, the only thing that seemed to even marginally quench her endless godsdamned indigestion. The first ten minutes that came after the tea had properly steeped was assigned to the two brothers glaring at one another, which Caterina used to devour the rest of the pickled radishes that she always seemed to be craving (and at the most inopportune times) before helping herself to one of the mangoes as well. 

The next count of ten answered a few prerequisite questions: Macuil had spent whatever unspoken number of years since they’d last met wandering in much the same way that Cichol had, and with absolute pleasure in terms of his isolation; yes, he had heard what had happened in Zanado, and didn’t Cichol think that perhaps they very well deserved it ( _no_ , the green tinge to Cichol’s cheeks had answered, although he’d been too suddenly miserable to voice the words); yes, brother Indech had still been away when it’d happened, as far as Macuil understood it, and so most likely the little devil still lived, too.

“Of course there will be no _egg_ ,” came Macuil’s next piece of advice, his voice dripping with scorn as he shot a particularly withering stare at the two of them through the steam of his tea. “I don’t remember you being my most simple brother. Do try not to disappoint.”

“You are certain?”

“I saw you come wailing into this world myself, you little fool,” Macuil sighed. “All red and mean and positively shell-less.”

Cichol fiddled with his tea cup.

“And so...what _was_ the manner, then?” he asked his brother meekly, as if he’d just uttered the worst obscenity yet. Caterina rolled her eyes and helped herself to another sticky handful of mango. Macuil tossed his own exhausted breath into his teacup.

“Cichol,” he drawled after he’d finished his sip, “surely you are familiar enough with the particulars of all of that if you’ve made this child yourself.”

Cichol turned his usual shade of pink and took a slurping drink from his cup.

“Can you help with it?” Caterina intervened. Macuil looked at her as though she were a piglet suddenly inspired to sing a song.

“What do you take me for, a _midwife_?” he scoffed. “Your people are so talented at breeding. Surely you’ll find a mistress of the art for yourself. Or not. It is my understanding that mares foal of their own accord quite serviceably. Surely you are not so different in your finer parts.”

“I’ve been told that I’m a _serviceable_ mount,” Caterina agreed. Cichol took on the look of someone quite desperate to dissolve into dust. Macuil smirked, if ever so slightly, and very quickly hidden by another sip of tea.

“Quite,” he sniffed. “I must admit, however, that I am rather fascinated by your predicament. As talented as we are in many ways, I cannot think of a single predecessor so skilled in this accomplishment of yours, Cichol. Of course, no doubt there were some that tried, but perhaps not with the vigor of an Exile.” He wagged his brows at Cichol. “You and I are a rare breed, I suppose.”

“You and I are not the same,” Cichol disagreed quickly. Macuil shrugged.

“An interesting claim, given the circumstances. Although I suppose I have not seeded any women. I will give you that.”

“With _your_ charm?” Caterina intervened, winning an ever more convincing grin before Macuil erased it once more.

“Surely you must find it amusing,” Macuil continued on, still keeping his sights on Cichol alone. “As furious as Mother would have been for your breaking of one of her blessed rules, you might be the last hope for all of us. No doubt Seiros will have little interest in birthing brats herself. Let us hope you have quite the brood.”

“Seiros?” Cichol choked, setting his teacup aside as he leaned closer towards his brother across the table. “She lives as well?”

“By some miracle,” Macuil sighed. “Or curse, more like. Goodness, but you have been underwater for so very long, now haven’t you? She’s made a butchery of the continent. As is her way, of course.”

Cichol frowned and shook his head.

“You’ve seen her?”

“No,” Macuil answered. “Or at least not from anything but the greatest distance. No doubt she wishes to recruit us to her cause, of which I have very little interest in advancing. Save the man she tricks into serving as a headsman. Little sister will never run tired of rolling heads.”

“She wishes for revenge,” Cichol countered. Macuil scoffed.

“Yes. Vengeance for the warden from whose cage both you and I were so very eager to escape. Has fatherhood given you a change of heart?”

Cichol frowned but didn’t answer.

“In any case,” Macuil continued, “what I mean to say is that, egg or otherwise, I am very interested in this creature you’ve made. And since I have traveled all this way, and out of nothing but my immense charity, so I suppose I shall stay.”

“ _Stay_?” Cichol echoed flatly.

“Well, yes. It’s what you’ve asked for, isn’t it? So, you’ve won it — my expertise in its many forms, although,” he turned at the waist to finally face Caterina, “without direct exposure to your feminine charms, I do pray you understand?”

“But I’ve got so many of them,” she said with an exaggerated wink. “Don’t be shy if you change your mind.”

Macuil took on the look as though he’d swallowed something both rotten and sour.

“The mother of our people, Cichol,” he sighed, tortured. Cichol gave him another venomous stare. Macuil ignored him to drain the last sip from his cup. “And what progenitors you are.”

* * *

“I’m sorry,” Cichol breathed hours later, once they finally found themselves alone in their room after Macuil had successfully been sequestered into one of the newly rebuilt longhouses after promising not to make a midnight snack out of any of his neighbors. “Macuil is a... _bitter_ man.” 

“I found him rather sweet,” Caterina answered with a grin. Cichol let a rueful laugh slip through his lips as he trudged closer to her at her spot beside the bed while she undressed. “And besides, you know I do so love to collect nicknames. _Broodmare_ has a certain ring to it, don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry,” Cichol said again. Caterina laughed and shook her head, taking her time afterwards in stripping her shirt from her shoulders.

“Men have done far worse to me than call me _names_ , Key,” she reassured him. He remained unconvinced, sulking as he sunk into a seat at the bed. She watched amused as he bowed forward to pout with his nose buried between her breasts.

“ _Little brother_ ,” she remembered from their conversation after spending some time in picking apart a knot in his hair. “So you’re the younger, are you?”

“Yes,” he mumbled into her skin. “I and my sister Seiros were the last of my mother’s children.”

“The butcher?”

“The same,” he agreed with the sag of his shoulders.

“What a family,” Caterina admired. He huffed another breath into her breast. She parted the hair from his nape and kneaded some of the tension out from the muscles there. Not like he really _deserved_ it, but he’d been kind enough lately for her to forgive most of what he’d done. He was still solely responsible for their predicament, of course, but he’d managed to source the various oddities of her capricious appetites, and had even made a habit of rubbing her swollen feet at night, and so... well, life was simply a series of compromises, now wasn’t it?

“There was something else he said,” she added after a moment. He groaned at the idea of further revisiting their conversation, but seemed to at least understand that her massage would continue only if he stayed in place, and so he relented. “Were you really exiled from Zanado?”

“No,” Cichol scoffed. “I simply left, and of my own accord, if you must know. But Macuil’s departure was far less voluntary, as I would wager you can easily imagine.”

“How long ago did it happen?”

“A long while,” Cichol sighed. “I was little more than a child when I decided that I was destined for greener pastures. Unfortunately for me, I only learned the truth of everything once I’d gone.”

“The truth?”

“Oh, you know it,” he said. He nodded upwards to stare at her, his lips still pressed against her heartbeat. She thought about the endless seas she’d traveled, and the same miserable bastards she always seemed to meet no matter the city where she’d laid her head. It was easy enough to imagine his quicksilver body in her stead. Disappointment: that life they’d both led. 

“I know it,” she agreed.

“Zanado was a wall, not a door,” he added wistfully, turning his cheek against her chest as he stared towards the window spilling moonlight across their bed. “Once I’d gone there was nothing to return to.”

She smoothed a hand along his shoulders.

“That sounds lonely,” she admitted. He sighed and leaned backwards to spread himself along the bed. Caterina stepped out of her trousers and then joined him, slipping herself beneath the sheets.

“It was,” he said too long after, once he’d shed his clothes as well and had crouched over the edge of the bed to blow out the nearby candle. She listened to him settle himself beside her. They both eased into the familiar shapes they made together when they slept. His fingers spread over her belly, the way they often did. She let them stray, eyes settling into the darkness of the ceiling above their head.

 _Lonely_ , she wondered, listening to the slowing of Cichol’s breath, and the cicadas chirping outside, and the creak of the building’s wooden beams as they cooled in the night. What else would have compelled a divine woman to build her own city out of clay children? Maybe Caterina’s father had been lonely, too. _Lonely, lonely_ ; and them such wretched creatures, made not from love but loneliness.


End file.
